The pioneers of the sustainable farming movement are mourning what they call the downfall of the organic program, following a November 1, 2017 vote by a group of government farming advisers that could determine the future of the $50 billion organic industry.  At issue was whether a booming generation of hydroponic, aquaponic and aeroponic farms—which grow plants in nutrients without using soil, frequently indoors—could continue to sell their produce under the “organic” label.  In a series of narrow votes, an advisory board to the U.S. Department of Agriculture voted to allow the majority of these operators to remain a part of the organic program.  The November 1 recommendation, issued by the National Organic Standards Board, came in four parts.  The board voted to keep out aeroponic farming, which grows plants—typically herbs and leafy greens—suspended in the air with their roots exposed.  But it voted to allow hydroponics, which grow plants in water-based nutrient solutions, and aquaponics, which combine hydroponic systems with farmed fish operations.  The board also declined to tighten its restrictions on container growing, a variation on hydroponics that involves raising plants in containers filled with a mixture of organic matter, water and nutrients.  That system has been adopted by a number of major organic berry growers, such as Driscoll’s and Wholesum Harvest.  During NOSB testimony Tuesday, several organic farmers protested the certification of hydroponic farms, wearing T-shirts that said “Save the Organic Label.”  At recent rallies in Hanover, N.H., and Burlington, Vt., protesters held signs with slogans such as “keep the soil in organic.”  “This notion that organic farmers are stuck in the past, or that they’re a bunch of Luddites hanging on to the way things used to be—that’s a misnomer,” said Cameron Harsh, the senior manager for organic and animal policy at the Center for Food Safety.  “Soilless systems are just incompatible with the organic program and its regulations.”  But in a series of close 8-7 votes, the NOSB appeared to disagree.  Instead, it sided with hydroponic growers, many of whom have spent several years and several thousand dollars acquiring their organic certification.  Their advocates have argued that soilless farming is consistent with the goals of the organic program:  It utilizes organic fertilizers and cuts down on pesticide and water use—often to levels much lower than those on land-based organic operations.  Because hydroponic farms are frequently built indoors, they are said to provide opportunity to urban growers who could not otherwise access agricultural land.  Caitlin Dewey  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/02/pioneers-of-organic-farming-are-threatening-to-leave-the-program-they-helped-create/?utm_term=.3a55275160f5

The Motograph News Bulletin, or "zipper" as it was known informally, was an impressive sight when it was first unveiled in the fall of 1928.  It extended 380 feet around the fourth floor of what was then the Times Tower at One Times Square--the second tallest building in Manhattan when it opened in 1904.  With a band five-feet tall, the moving letters, comprising 14,800 light bulbs, were visible from a distance of several city blocks.  November 6, 1928also happened to be election day in the United States, and the zipper's first message was "Herbert Hoover defeats Al Smith."  The zipper, also known at that time as the "Motogram" sign, was installed for The New York Times by Frank C. Reilly, who is credited as being the inventor of electric signs with moving letters.  According to a New York Times article, "Inside the control room, three cables poured energy into transformers.  The hookup to all the bulbs totaled 88,000 soldered connections.  Messages from a ticker came to a desk beside a cabinet like the case that contained type used by old-time compositors.  The cabinet contained thin slabs called letter elements.  An operator composed the message letter by letter in a frame.  The zipper was updated in 1997 with 227,200 amber-colored LEDs, expected to last up to 100,000 hours--30 times as long as the bulbs they replaced and using only about one-tenth the electricity.  Dow Jones currently holds the lease to the operate the sign.  Headlines are now auto-published with feeds from The Wall Street Journal Online, the Associated Press, and AccuWeather.com.  https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4400674/Motograph-News-Bulletin-debuts-in-New-York-City--November-6--1928

On May 6, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA).  The WPA was just one of many Great Depression relief programs created under the auspices of the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which Roosevelt had signed the month before.  The WPA, the Public Works Administration (PWA) and other federal assistance programs put unemployed Americans to work in return for temporary financial assistance.  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-creates-the-wpa

The success of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs has been argued about for years.  Some say that the government overstepped its bounds and that the United States was dangerously close to becoming a totalitarian government under President Roosevelt.  Some argue that unemployment was not erased during the New Deal years and only World War Two was responsible for the end of the Great Depression.  What cannot be debated, however, is that the New Deal programs gave hope to millions of citizens who had given up hope.  What cannot be debated is that the infrastructure of the United States was rebuilt and modernized and many of the projects were springboards for a future where the U.S. would dominate world affairs.  The sheer number of accomplishments is staggering.  CCC projects included 3,470 fire towers erected, 97,000 miles of roads built, 3 billion trees planted, 711 state parks created and over 3 million men employed.  The PWA funded the construction of over 34,000 projects, including airports, dams, schools and hospitals.  The WPA is credited with having constructed 651,087 miles of roadways, repaired 125,110 public buildings and constructed 853 landing fields.  From 1933 and the birth of the New Deal to 1939, unemployment dropped from approximately 15 million to 9 million and most of those workers were employed by New Deal programs.  https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Great-Depressions-The-Top-Five-Public-Works-Projects-of-the-New-Deal  See also Records of the Work Projects Administration [WPA] at https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/069.html

An "alphabet soup" of federal programs, including REA (Rural Electrification Administration), SSB (Social Security Board) and PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) were part of the New Deal.  In Ohio, Poindexter Village, the first Columbus housing project, opened in 1940.  The Ohio History Connection has approved purchase of the two remaining buildings of Poindexter Village as its 59th historic site.  Echoes, January-February 2018 

List of characters in the works of Charles Dickens.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dickensian_characters

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

hokum   (HO-kuhm)  noun  1.  Nonsense.  2.  Trite material introduced to evoke an emotional response from an audience.  A blend of hocus-pocus + bunkum.  Earliest documented use:  1917.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day 
From:  Ossie Bullock  Subject:  hokum  Through the wonderful (and free access) California Digital Newspaper Collection (part of the National Digital Newspaper Program), I have managed to push the word’s first appearance back nearly a decade.  A theater review in the LA Herald of 9 Nov 1908 says of two performers in a new show, “Watson and Williams, who jingle the bells for this spicy aggregation, hand out a high class line of hokum, and some of their merry quips have the surprising quality of newness.”
From:  Galen Denio   Subject:  Hokum  Hokum bowing with the fiddle is a style of bluegrass music.

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.  As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."  The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It:  How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".  The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras.  This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

January 21, 2018  Jack Whitten (1939–2018)   Jack Whitten, a conceptual painter who tested the medium’s limits for more than five decades, has died at seventy-eight.  The artist, awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 2016 for “remaking the American canvas,” was dubbed the father of new abstraction by the New York Times. Throughout his career, Whitten eschewed the popular or marketable for what interested him philosophically, and was largely unrecognized by the mainstream until recent years, following a major 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California.  Born in segregated Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Whitten became engaged in activism while he was a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, before moving to New York in 1960 to attend Cooper Union. There, influenced by Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis, he started making his earliest paintings, vaguely figural impressions that reflected on the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.  It was in the 1970s that Whitten became interested in abstraction, experimenting with forms of painting without conventionally gestural elements by employing combs, metal sheets, laminations, rakes, and a twelve-foot-long squeegee to administer acrylic on large canvases.  These pieces, which he called his “Slab” works, were displayed in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 for the artist’s first institutional solo show.  Whitten would later reference ancient mosaics in his art, combining chips of dried acrylic into monumental portraits of people important to him, like Ralph Ellison and Miles Davis.  “I have changed the verb ‘to paint,’” Whitten said in a 1994 interview in Bomb.  “I don’t paint a painting, I make a painting.  So the verb has changed.  And in doing that, I’ve broken through a lot of illusionistic qualities.”  https://www.artforum.com/news/id=73715

Ursula K. Le Guin, a prolific novelist best known for the Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness, died January 21, 2018 at the age of 88.  Across more than 20 novels and scores of short stories, Le Guin crafted fantastic worlds to grapple with profoundly difficult questions here on Earth, from class divisions to feminist theory.   Across the decades-long span of her career--from her first short story submission at the age of 11 to her work well into her 80s--Le Guin stood as a towering figure in science fiction and fantasy.  Indeed, she completed a triple crown of the genres' biggest prizes, earning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards several times over.  Colin Dwyer  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/23/580109007/ursula-le-guin-whose-novels-plucked-truth-from-high-fantasy-dies-at-88  Le Guin published more than 20 novels and 100 short stories, wrote 12 collections of poetry and several of essays, and 13 books for children.  Michael Berry  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Ursula-K-Le-Guin-inspired-countless-read  Read A Left-Handed Commencement Address (Mills College, 1983) by Ursula Le Guin, ranked one of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Texas A&M University, at http://www.ursulakleguin.com/LeftHandMillsCollege.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1832  January 24, 2018  On this date in 1968, London witnessed a double debut:  the first concert of the London Sinfonietta, a chamber group which would go on to become one of the Britain’s most famous new music ensembles and, on their debut program, the premiere performance of a dramatic cantata by John Tavener, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most famous contemporary composers.  Tavener’s cantata was titled, “The Whale.”  In 1997, when the funeral service for Princess Diana was broadcast worldwide, it was Tavener’s serenely lyrical anthem “Song for Athene” that was chosen to accompany the Princess’s coffin as it left Westminster Abbey.  Composers Datebook