Vox clamantis in deserto
Insurer’s app for injured employees
The 24-story Travelers Tower, in Hartford, built in 1919. The tower remains the largest office of the big insurance company, although Travelers’ headquarters is now in New York City. Hartford was once called “The Insurance Capital of the World.’’
Edited from a New England Council report (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Travelers Cos. Inc has launched an app to help promote mental health and facilitate recovery for injured employees. By using technology from Wysa called ‘The Wysa for Return to Work’ app, which is programmed by artificial intelligence, Travelers has found a way to help employees improve their mental resilience.
“Travelers found that around 40 perceny of injured employees experienced a psychosocial barrier that stagnated their recovery. Nurses at Travelers define psychosocial barriers as an attitude, state or consciousness that affects a person’s ability to communicate.
‘‘‘The Wysa for Return to Work’ app responds to users through a secure texting-style platform to offer assistance such as cognitive behavioral techniques and breathing exercises to alleviate mental health struggles. The results from the initial launch of the app have been promising. Travelers report that workers using the app missed one-third fewer workdays versus employees not using the app.
“Dr. Marcos Iglesias, chief medical director at Travelers, said, ‘Factors unrelated to an individual’s injury, such as fear, unrealistic expectations, lack of sleep or minimal social support, can hinder the recovery process. Helping injured employees bounce back requires an approach that addresses an individual’s physical and mental health challenges.”’
‘The Great Mystery’
“Sumi Shrine” (mixed media construction), by Berkshires-based artist Thomas Schneider, in his show, opening Feb. 4, “Ecstatic Gates: Devotional Objects, Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture’,’ at Creative Connections Gallery, Ashburnham, Mass.
The gallery says:
“Thomas Schneider is an artist who has recently moved his studio to North Adams, Mass. His work for the past 10 years has been evolving through different art forms and mediums, guided by his own personal awakening. His current project , ‘Ecstatic Gates,’ features a series of miniature wall shrines. Each piece is a kind devotional object, altar, or chapel, as well as a dwelling place for the imagination. These shrines express Thomas’s sense of wonder for the Great Mystery, his penchant for whimsy, and his connection to the wild. They are delicately crafted in wood, with adornments in gold leaf, bone, porcupine needles, horse hair, and other natural materials. “
In North Adams, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), formerly the Arnold Print Works and a facility of Sprague Electronics.
— Photo by Beyond My Ken
Joy from the cloud
“Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again…’’
— From “The Rain Spoke to Me,’’ by Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet. She spent much of her life in Provincetown, of which wrote: , "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers….’’
Honking commuter
Charlie Longtine, “Mass Ave, 8:45 AM” (oil on panel), at the Copley Society of Art, Boston, in the show “Holiday Small Works 2022.’’
— Photo courtesy Copley Society of Art
Massachusetts Avenue in Boston.
Lara Pfadt: Decarbonizing New England campuses
Wellesley College’s Pomeroy Hall living room showing upgrades, including new lighting and sensitive paint colors.
—Photo courtesy of Raj Das Photography
From The England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).
Over the past decades, universities have been at the forefront of establishing ambitious goals for decarbonizing campuses. While there are many variables in how to advance energy efficiency in the campus-built environment, some universities have taken the strategic approach of combining energy efforts with the heavy maintenance and upkeep needs of the buildings.
Universities must identify and solve challenges associated with buildings of different eras, programmatic uses, MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) systems, and energy generation. This can be daunting, but necessary for a carbon-neutral future, and collaboration with university stakeholders, contractors, and engineers can be the key to success.
Our Boston-based architectural firm Finegold Alexander has had the opportunity to work with several campuses, including Amherst College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Wellesley College, in the town of the same name,. and Brandeis University, in Waltham, on energy master plans and targeted renovations to achieve decarbonization goals. This work includes collaborating with an interdisciplinary team to identify targeted, cost-effective actions at individual buildings that meet institutional priorities of energy reduction, deferred maintenance, and accessibility.
A case study at Wellesley
In 2019, Finegold Alexander was engaged by Wellesley College to study early 20th Century residence halls to realize significant deferred maintenance, infrastructure, and accessibility upgrades across campus. Simultaneously, Wellesley was in the midst of an energy master plan to determine how to meet its “E2040” goals of reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 90 percent below 2010 levels.
The energy master plan looked at ways to reduce GHG emissions from space heating and cooling across the entire portfolio of buildings. The historic residence halls connect to the campus steam loop and are heated with steam or hot-water radiators. Salas O’Brien (formerly named MEP Associates) led the master plan, which involves the conversion of the campus from a steam distribution loop to low-temperature hot water. This changeover to low-temperature water supports potential geothermal installations, gradually reducing energy input and, therefore, carbon emissions.
Tower Court at Wellesley College.
The built environment, and energy used to power it, is a major contributor to GHG emissions on campuses. Wellesley College is no different. Many of its buildings date from the early 20th century and produce higher energy usage due to mass masonry wall construction, original steel windows, slate roofs, and complex gothic detailing. Working alongside Salas O’Brien, Finegold Alexander asked questions about the implications of this work for the architecture of the campus’s historic and existing buildings. Were the colleges considering envelope upgrades? What about potential code triggers when infrastructure work exceeds certain dollar values? Were there synergies to be found by addressing deferred maintenance at the same time as energy infrastructure? How can embodied carbon be measured simultaneously with operational carbon in these plans?
One targeted renovation includes Severance Hall, built in 1926 and part of the college’s iconic Tower Court complex. Finegold Alexander started at the building envelope exploring upgrade options and energy conservation measures, testing each through energy modeling and providing lifecycle costing for each. Energy conservation measures were also reviewed to curb deferred maintenance issues, such as water intrusion and occupant comfort issues. Through this comparison, the design team and college settled on a path combining new insulated walls at the exterior with interior storm windows. This plan allowed for a decrease in the radiator size of the new low-temperature system while providing greater comfort for occupants.
In addition to the envelope efforts, conversations with residential life stakeholders set program and energy goals, allowing the project to incorporate outward-facing improvements and stay within budget. These items include updates to the historic living room and other gathering spaces—focusing on an infusion of new A/V, functional and decorative lighting, and technology to showcase historic features. Renovations, including kitchenettes, bathrooms and common spaces, provide fully accessible and more functional spaces, carving out small gathering areas off the long corridors of this Victorian-era residence hall.
What’s next?
Universities and colleges continue to pave the way in terms of sustainability goals, but in recent years, such goals can be found across other sectors, such as towns and cities developing sustainability master plans and adopting net zero goals. The increased federal and state support, largely stemming from the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, in the form of grants and building code modifications, supports the energy efficiency efforts in our communities and institutions.
Lara Pfadt is a senior associate architect and sustainability strategist at Finegold Alexander Architects.
Darker times back then
“White Angel Breadline 1932’’ (gelatin silver enlargement print), by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
Tax challenges in a resort town
Colonial era buildings in a Newport historic district.
— Photo by Daniel Case
Newport Tax Change
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Newport has adopted a new two-tier residential tax system that may cut taxes for many homeowners. The people who would get the break include owners of single-family homes who prove that they’re residents of the City by the Sea for more than seven months a year as well as owners of residential rental properties of three or fewer units whose renters’ leases run for at least a year.
The tax rate will remain higher for non-owner-occupied housing.
Earlier this year, Rhode Island state Sen. Dawn Euer said of the state legislation authorizing the change:
“As we know, our whole state and Newport especially are deep in an affordable housing crisis, and residential property tax relief is one tool to help address affordability…. Vacation rentals and short-term rentals take away from year-round housing, and while they do provide revenue, they contribute to our city’s housing crisis. Making a distinction between them will give residents the tax relief they need, and encourage property owners to create and maintain the permanent housing we desperately need.”
This arrangement should help stabilize housing in the city, which has long been destabilized by the high number of financially alluring (for property owners) expensive short-term warm-weather or even weekend rentals. But it’s hard to know what the effect on total property-tax revenue for the city might be. It will probably take a year to find out.
In any event, some lessons for other communities will come out of the Newport program, especially those in coastal resort areas.
Chris Powell: What housing emergency?
In Danbury: Clockwise from top left: Main Street Historic District, The Summit at Danbury, Tarrywile Mansion, Praxair Headquarters, Danbury Municipal Airport, Danbury Fair Mall, David Wooster Monument, Western Connecticut State University, and the Danbury Railway Museum
— Wikipedia
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Maybe the recession that has begun will loosen up Connecticut's housing market, but it will take a while even as the poor get poorer. The housing shortage is already making life desperate for many of the poor. But state government doesn't yet consider it an emergency, not even in the face of what seems about to happen in Danbury.
For the two years of the virus epidemic a former hotel building in Danbury has been operated as a shelter for the homeless by a social-service organization based in Stamford, Pacific House. The organization got state financing to purchase the building for use as a shelter but Danbury's zoning board has refused to approve it. The shelter has stayed in operation only because of one of Gov. Ned Lamont's emergency orders arising from the epidemic, but those orders expire Dec. 28.
The former hotel is adjacent to Interstate 84 and few residences are nearby, so the shelter is no more of a nuisance than the hotel was. While it is far from medical and commercial facilities and thus not the most convenient location for the homeless, Pacific House can bring services to them or help them get where they need to go as they work to gain self-sufficiency.
If state government really cared about the poor and troubled, it would pass a law exempting shelters from zoning regulations just as it has exempted group homes for the mentally handicapped.
Danbury lacks any facility that can accommodate all the people now being housed at the former hotel. Most may be out on the street at the end of the month just as the dead of winter sets in. Surely state government can put aside less essential matters until it solves the emergency housing problem.
Crooked guards
Connecticut's Correction Department lately worsened the state's housing problem. It was inadvertent but predictable.
Since prison guards work in tightly confined spaces and were at more risk of contracting COVID 19, the department used federal epidemic emergency money to let them rent hotel rooms so they might avoid infecting their families.
But, the Connecticut Mirror reports, state auditors found that the program was badly abused. Correction Department employees, the Mirror says, "used the program to book hotel rooms during a wedding, to celebrate New Year's Eve, and to live full-time in the hotels with their families. ... Others booked rooms in multiple hotels on the same days, and at least one correction officer used the program while he was on military leave." Some employees used the program to live in hotels for five months or more.
There were rules again this kind of thing but since this was an emergency, no one was hired to enforce them. Some employees who abused the program suffered short suspensions but it seems that no one was fired or prosecuted.
Of course, much federal emergency money has been defrauded throughout the country, just as it was defrauded by the corrupt city government in West Haven, where more than a million dollars was stolen or misdirected by a City Council aide who was also a state representative.
The lesson seems to be that any emergency's first order of business should be to hire extra auditors.
Another murder despite protective order
Another Connecticut woman who had a protective order was murdered the other week, apparently by the former boyfriend she got the order against. Julie Minogue of Milford was battered to death with an ax after her ex had harassed her with hundreds of text messages. An arrest warrant application for the harasser had been pending, left incomplete, for weeks.
The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence says there have been 12 intimate partner murders in the state so far this year.
The only way to stop them is to require police, prosecutors, and courts to give priority to domestic threats and violence and to impose heavy penalties upon conviction, even for first offenses. Here too state government is always doing many less important things.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
And Hell that way
Lake Waramaug, in Litchfield, Conn., with Mt. Bushnell across the water.Z
“This was a little valley all to myself
In Connecticut’s northern hills: Cornwall was there;
Warren to westward: Waramaug Lake to the south;
And the great Gehenna {hell} sufficient six-score leagues—’’
“From “Death at The Purple Rim,’’ by Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962), a poet who grew up in Connecticut.
Your own tyrants
1814 map showing the location of the Federal Street Church, led by William Ellery Channing. The building was eventually abandoned because of the neighborhood’s density and the congregation moved to the Arlington Street Church (built 1861), below, often called “the Unitarian Vatican.’’
“The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.”
— William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), Boston-based Unitarian minister and theologian
Reminder
”Global Inversion” (wool felt, human hair and acrylic hair), by Diane Jacobs (America and Jewish), at the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art.
Museum of Science, gaming firm join the metaverse
Inside the Blue Wing of the Boston Museum of Science
Edited from a New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com) report
The Boston Museum of Science is teaming up with the gaming company Roblox to join the metaverse by launching an immersive online game titled ‘‘Mission: Mars”.
Using data provided by NASA, Mission: Mars will encourage players to navigate engineering challenges around the planet. Some missions will recall science fiction, such as rescuing virtual explorers, but most challenges are inspired by the experiences of real astronauts.
Staff at the museum say that the game will expand beyond just using virtual reality. Mission: Mars will be available for free at schools to encourage teachers to incorporate the game into their teaching. The museum would like to continue to develop programs using Roblox’s platform in an effort to expand access to academic resources.
The Museum of Science’s president, Tim Ritchie, said, “I think you can build and design and use your heart and your mind and your hands, so to speak, by building things and designing things in a digital world. And in fact, it’s a lot less expensive to do so. And you can reach people all over this country and all over the world.”
Tough customers
This is a statue at the Massachusetts State House of the formidable Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), a Puritan spiritual adviser, religious reformer and a founder of Portsmouth, R.I.
“The clear lesson of New England's history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so. “
— Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), American novelist, short-story writer and environmentalist
This last season
Covered bridge in Henniker, N.H.
— Photo by Jokermage
”This change of light and how it wakes you with uneasiness
and the shift of wind from the north that rains down ice
might keep you covered for months. You swear this will
be your last season in a place you believe is disappearing.’’
— From “This Last Place,’’ by Maura MacNeil, a Deering, N.H., poet and writing teacher at New England College, in Henniker.
America's culture of cocophany
Paint on a piece of film wrap over a bass speaker playing very loud music.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
America is a noisy place, often painfully so. But many people seem to like that.
The other night, six of us went to a Mexican restaurant in Providence called Dolores. The food was pretty good, though the service was a bit slow because of what appeared to be the staffing shortage that bedevils many restaurants. Always a tough business, but much more so in the Age of COVID.
It was a painful meal for us. The bass-heavy background music made it very arduous to try to hear what people across the table were saying. The next day, our ears still hurt from two hours in the racket.
And yet the place was packed on that Monday evening. You could see customers shouting to each other, but most were smiling. My hunch is that for many people in our culture of cacophony, a noisy place signifies excitement and somehow evokes the happy idea that they’re where the action is – that they’re not missing out.
Since the last two generations have grown up amidst increasing noise – rock music, etc. – that’s more and more difficult to escape – perhaps quiet makes them nervous.
Meanwhile, the gasoline-powered leaf blowers shriek from dawn to dusk, polluting the air and driving away the birds and indeed many walkers who try to avoid the racket, the fumes and the grit by finding other routes. And drugstores have automated bad music.
‘Fragile systems of beauty’
“Breakthrough” (sculptural collage, mixed media including wood panels, tree bark, acryli and plexiglass), by Boston area artist Luanne Witkowski, in her show “Clarity,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, March 1-April 2.
The gallery says:
Ms. Witkowski “uses both found natural materials and fabricated cast-offs and scraps, focusing on composition, recurrent pattern, minimalist form, and color to create an artistic response to the fragile systems of beauty and the raw power that exist in both the natural world and urban landscapes. For the artist, this response is accessible through the contemplative creative process of perception, when we allow ourselves to relax into our senses. Witkowski’s daily routines - walking through forests, parks and countryside of wildlife, flora and fauna followed by engagement with city streets, glass and artificial light - interweave the interaction and juxtaposition of her various materials. In doing so, she recalls the shared experiences grounded in each of us: creating a perceptual and spiritual relationship for recognition of and solace for the self. This approach to the identification of the individual with landscape and environment is enlarged by a desire to discover and connect with the particular indwelling essence or energy of clarity.’’
Llewellyn King: New hope arises for fusion energy after years of broken hearts, but….
The target chamber of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition on Dec. 5, 2022.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
While the rafters are ringing with praise for the nuclear-fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), let me inject a sour note: This isn’t the beginning of cheap, safe, non-polluting electricity.
It is a scientific milestone, not an electricity one. Science tantalizes but it also deceives. Often the mission turns out not to be the one for which years of scientific research was aiming.
I would remind the world that science stirred great hope futilely with the idea of superconductivity at ambient temperatures, after some laboratory success.
The history of fusion itself is a clear illustration of expectations dashed, revived, resurrected, and dashed again. Now there is some hope with a stunning lab success: the first future experiment with “gain,” meaning more energy came out of the experiment than went into it.
Fusion has been the goal, the light at the end of the tunnel for nuclear researchers for over 60 years. In that time there have been false prophets, failed attempts, elaborate claims, and just hard slog.
That hard slog has shown what is possible: More power has been achieved in a fusion experiment for a fraction of a second. That is a huge success but it isn’t limitless electricity, as some have heralded.
Fission — which makes possible our power reactors and warships — is the splitting of the atom to release heat that is converted, via steam, into electricity.
Fusion, beguiling fusion, seeks to do what happens in stars and the sun — the fusing of two atoms together to produce heat, which, in a reactor, would be used to create steam and turn turbines, making electricity.
Governments and researchers have salivated over the possibility of fusion for decades and it has been well-funded worldwide, compared with other energy sources.
Getting fusion temperatures at or above those on the sun must be achieved to fuse two deuterium atoms together. Deuterium, also called “heavy hydrogen,” is an isotope of hydrogen. If you can do that and sustain the reaction for months and years, you can then design a reactor that would create steam, or use some other fluid, to turn a turbine.
There are two approaches scientists have used to get fusion. One is inertial fusion, used in the breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, near San Francisco, which involves hitting a pellet with a concentrated beam of energy: The lab used 192 super-powerful lasers to get fusion.
In the early 1980s, I spent time at LLNL and watched an experiment to hit the target with big accelerators. There were, as I recall, eight of them the size of cars. The research scientist showing me the facility said that accelerators the size of locomotives were needed to continue the experiments.
The other approach to get fusion is the tokamak, a Russian word, which describes a doughnut-shaped machine where a plasma is superheated with electricity, and the whole thing is held together in powerful magnetic fields. This is the technology being pursued internationally by a 35-nation consortium at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), in Cadarache, southern France.
This tokamak, or toroidal approach, is the one most favored in the community to succeed eventually as a source of heat to make electricity.
Also, a lot of solid work on fusion has been done at the General Atomics facility in La Jolla, Calif., and at research facilities across the United States and around the world. I visited the General Atomics site many times, crawled inside the machine, and wondered at the math and science that have gone into the pursuit of fusion.
Back in the 197os, physicist Keeve “Kip” Siegel believed that he could achieve fusion with simple, off-the-shelf optical lasers. He died of a stroke in March 1975, while testifying before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy in defense of his laser fusion research.
Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of Penthouse, hooked up with a former member of Congress from Washington State, Mike McCormack, and together they sought to promote fusion.
Two eminent scientists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, thought they had a breakthrough with so-called cold fusion. But this chemical process hasn’t panned out.
When I was looking at that fusion experiment at LLNL in the early 1980s, the researcher showed me on his computer a wonderful new way of communicating with other scientists around the world. I thought it was just a Telex on steroids and went back to questions about fusion, despite my guide's enthusiasm for the new communications system.
It was the Internet, and I missed the big story — as big as a story can get — to keep reporting on fusion. You can see why I may be soured.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. He’s a long-time journalist, speaker and consultant in the energy sector.
Web site: whchronicle.com
‘I’m spoiled’
— Photo by Niranjan Arminius
Start of a game of water polo on Main Street, Saxtons River, after the July 4th parade in 2013. The game is played by volunteer firefighters with fire hoses, trying to spray the ball down the street to a goal. Looking west at the Saxtons River Historical Society (a former Congregational church).
“I’m spoiled by the lack of traffic, the beauty all around me, the night sky, the wildlife, and having more space and time to think and be creative.’’
— Julie Moir Messervy, Saxtons River, Vt.-based landscape architect, in Vermont Life magazine. Saxtons River is a village in the town of Rockingham.
Movements in lives
“Dance of the Titled Mothers” (acrylic and natural dyes and pigments on burlap and handwoven cotton cloth) by Boston-based artist Stephen Hamilton, in his show “Passages: Stephen Hamilton,’’ at LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 31.
— Photo courtesy of LaiSun Keane Gallery
Mr. Hamilton incorporates both Western and African techniques in his work. He says this show "examines the movement between adolescence and adulthood, adulthood and elderhood, as well as life, death, and rebirth in African and African-American folklore and philosophy." For more information, please visit here.