EPA Announces Cleanup Plan for Radiation Technology Superfund Site in Rockaway Township, New Jersey

Congressmember Rodney Frelinghuysen and EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck

Tour Six Superfund Sites in Morris, Essex and Sussex Counties

 

 

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Regional Administrator Judith A. Enck and Congressmember Rodney P. Frelinghuysen today announced a plan to demolish or remove 34 buildings and structures at the Radiation Technology, Inc. Superfund site in Rockaway Township, New Jersey. The buildings and structures on the 263-acre site are contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos and lead among other contaminants.

 

Congressmember Frelinghuysen and the EPA then toured six Superfund sites in Morris, Essex and Sussex Counties as part of an annual visit to check on progress at the sites. They were joined by state and local officials to highlight the success of the federal Superfund law in protecting the health of people who live and work near contaminated sites, creating jobs and boosting local economies.

 

“Each year, EPA joins Congressmember Rodney Frelinghuysen while he tours Superfund sites in New Jersey,” said EPA Regional Administrator Judith A. Enck. “New Jersey has the most Superfund cleanup sites in the nation. A strong national Superfund program is vital to protecting the health of people who live and work in every corner of New Jersey.”

Superfund is the federal cleanup program established by Congress in 1980 to investigate and clean up the country’s most hazardous waste sites. The Superfund program operates on the principle that polluters should pay for the cleanups, rather than passing the costs to taxpayers. The EPA searches for parties legally responsible for the contamination at sites that are placed on the Superfund list and it seeks to hold those parties accountable for the costs of investigations and cleanups. Cleanups are only funded by taxpayer dollars when those responsible for the pollution cannot be found or are not financially viable.

The 263 acre Radiation Technology, Inc. Superfund site in Rockaway Township was used for testing and developing rocket motors and propellants. Groundwater at the site is contaminated with volatile organic compounds. Due to its complexity, the EPA's cleanup of the Radiation Technology site has been conducted in phases. Alliant Techsystems, a successor to a past owner and operator, is cleaning up the groundwater and soil and is under EPA oversight. The company installed systems to monitor ground water and nearby drinking water wells. While the ground water is contaminated, that contamination is not impacting people’s drinking water wells. In 1994, the EPA finalized plans to install a system to extract and treat the contaminated groundwater. Alliant Techsystems is currently studying an alternative to a groundwater treatment system. They are testing a method that involves injection of emulsified oil to break up contaminants. The EPA removed 75 rusting and leaking drums and containers from a building at the site in March 2013. The EPA chose a plan to remove and properly dispose of badly deteriorated drums buried at the site in July 2014. That work is ongoing. Today the EPA finalized its plan to demolish, remove, or use others cleanup measures to address buildings and structures that are contaminated with PCBs, asbestos, and lead.

 

In addition to the Radiation Technology, Inc. Superfund site, the other sites on the tour include: 

The Mansfield Trail Dump Superfund site, located in Byram Township, is in a wooded area near the intersection of the Mansfield bike path and Stanhope-Sparta Road. Sludge of unknown origin was deposited in trenches in the area and has contaminated the groundwater with volatile organic and benzene compounds. Benzene is cancer-causing. The groundwater is used by some nearby residents as drinking water. Vapors from the contaminated groundwater underneath area homes have seeped into some basements. The site was first addressed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, with the EPA taking over the lead when the site was added to the Superfund list in 2011. Prior to 2011, the NJDEP did extensive testing of drinking water wells and the air inside homes to determine if they were impacted by the contamination. The NJDEP subsequently installed carbon water filtration and treatment systems in 16 homes to remove contaminants from the drinking water. In addition, NJDEP installed ventilation systems in several homes to address the chemical vapors that had seeped into the basements. In 2012, EPA removed 11,700 tons of contaminated material from the dump areas and disposed of it off-site. A study to more fully determine the nature and extent of the groundwater contamination is currently underway.

The Rockaway Township Wells Superfund site, located in Rockaway Township, is a two-square-mile wellfield containing a cluster of three municipal wells within 100 feet of each other that are contaminated with various volatile organic chemicals from industrial buildings in the area. NJDEP is leading the cleanup, and has developed a plan to treat the contaminated groundwater and replace the township’s existing air stripper, which forces air through polluted groundwater to remove harmful chemicals. The air causes the chemicals to change from a liquid to a gas, which is then collected and cleaned. Sampling of several buildings has shown that chemical vapors have gotten into some buildings on the site. To address these problems, systems were installed to prevent soil vapors from entering two buildings. Groundwater from the area of drinking water supply wells is currently being treated to remove the contamination and provide the community a safe source of drinking water.

 

The Rockaway Borough Wellfield Superfund site includes three municipal water supply wells that supply drinking water to 11,000 people. In 1985, the NJDEP investigated the site and concluded that contamination found in the municipal water supply was coming from multiple source areas within the borough. The EPA investigated the contamination and determined that soil and groundwater was contaminated with perchloroethylene, an industrial solvent. The EPA also determined that a facility belonging to Klockner and Kockner was contaminating the soil with tetrachloroethene, a commonly used industrial solvent. The EPA has removed the contaminated soil and sent it to a facility certified to treat and dispose of it. In November 2011, EPA began operation of a groundwater treatment system to address perchloroethylene-contaminated groundwater in the East Main Street/Wall Street area of the site. In addition, work to remove and treat soil contaminated with lead at the Rockaway Borough site was completed in 2013. 

The Caldwell Trucking Co. Superfund site is a former sewage hauling site occupying 11 acres in Fairfield. The Caldwell Trucking site consists of properties and groundwater contaminated by the disposal of residential, commercial and industrial septic waste. Caldwell Trucking disposed of this waste in unlined lagoons from the early 1950s until 1973. After 1973, Caldwell installed underground storage tanks for the storage of the waste. Other industrial facilities in the area may also have contributed to the groundwater contamination. The parties responsible for the cleanup have removed the contaminated soil and sludge from the lagoons and installed wells to monitor groundwater quality. All contaminated soil has also been removed or no longer poses a risk and impacted wetlands have been restored. Since 1981, more than 300 private wells in the area have been taken out of service due to contamination. The affected residences have been connected to the municipal drinking water supply system. A groundwater extraction and treatment system, which pumps the groundwater to the surface where it is treated, began operation in 2008. The air inside nearly 100 homes was tested and ventilation systems were installed in 18 of them to address vapors that had seeped from the contaminated groundwater underneath into the basements.

 

The Unimatic Manufacturing Corporation Superfund site in Fairfield was a metals molding facility, which operated machines using lubricating oil that contained polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The company’s operations contaminated soil, groundwater and a building with PCBs. The nearest public drinking water wells are located less than one-half mile from the site. The water supply is monitored regularly to ensure the water quality meets drinking water standards and is safe to consume. Since 2002, the facility has been used by Frameware, Inc., a metal frame parts manufacturer and distributor. In May 2012, at the request of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the EPA took samples inside and outside the building on the site. Based on the results of EPA’s sampling, the New Jersey Department of Health, in consultation with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, recommended that employees of the facility be relocated. Frameware, Inc. moved its operations and removed approximately 20 workers from the contaminated work environment. The EPA plans a study to more fully determine the nature and extent of the groundwater contamination.

Remarks by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Legal Services Corporation 40th Anniversary Event

United States

 ~ 

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Thank you, Dean [Martha] Minow, for those kind words – and thank you all for being here.  I also want to recognize, and thank, my good friends John Levi and Jim Sandman for their leadership of the Legal Services Corporation over the years – and for the lifetimes of tireless work that they have dedicated to vulnerable populations from coast to coast.  Finally, I want to thank each and every one of you – the dedicated men and women who are making LSC’s work possible; who are helping to shine a light on the current challenges facing the legal aid community; and who are leading us to redouble our efforts to forge the more just society that all Americans deserve.  It’s gratifying to see so many diverse people and interests – from academia and government service, to private practice and corporate enterprise – converging to support equal justice under law. 

Forty years ago, in the last days of the Nixon Administration, an idea that had its roots in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society took hold in American law.  With the bipartisan passage and signing of the Legal Services Corporation Act, our country took a crucial step to codify its commitment to justice for all.  And in the decades since, LSC has grown to become the single largest funder of civil legal aid for low-income Americans, providing help and hope to countless individuals and families who are too often overlooked – and too often underserved.

Today, in more than 800 offices nationwide, attorneys and staff affiliated with LSC help obtain protective and restraining orders for victims of domestic violence, help fathers and mothers keep custody of their children, and help family members attain guardianship for young people who have lost their parents.  They support families at risk of losing their homes, veterans in need of federal resources, and disabled Americans who are being denied important benefits.  And they stand guard against unscrupulous lenders and dishonest employers who take advantage of those who are vulnerable. 

Every day, your efforts not only change lives – they transform entire communities.  They save precious taxpayer dollars, protect patients’ health, expand access to public benefits, keep families together, and offer disadvantaged citizens a pathway out of poverty.  They play a vital role in helping to close the “justice gap” that too often separates low-income individuals from the wealthy.  And without the critical help that LSC provides, many more Americans would find themselves unable to exercise their basic rights.  As my predecessor as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, once said – roughly a decade before this organization’s founding – “Unasserted, unknown, unavailable rights are no rights at all.” 

Of course, you perform this work because you understand that legal aid is nothing less than a professional responsibility, a moral obligation, and a national duty.  It lends meaning to our dearest values and strength to the application of our highest ideals.  And that’s why I want to make it abundantly clear this evening that – at every level of our nation’s Department of Justice – my colleagues and I are proud to stand with you.  And we are committed to doing our part. 

In recent years, under the leadership of President Obama, we’ve taken historic steps to ensure that basic legal services are available, accessible, and affordable for more and more people in this country.  Through the Access to Justice Initiative I launched in 2010 – and which is well-represented this evening by our Acting Senior Counselor, Karen Lash, and her colleagues – we’re working closely with state, local, tribal and federal officials, as well as an extensive network of nonprofit and private sector partners, to extend quality legal representation to low-income Americans. 

At the center of this work – in collaboration with the White House Domestic Policy Council – we have established the Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable, or LAIR, a group of 18 federal agencies dedicated to examining current programs and practices in order to create better outcomes.  As you know, this roundtable has been co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Tony West, who addressed this conference yesterday as one of his last official duties before leaving office – and without whose leadership it would not be as successful as it is today.  Already, LAIR is performing important work; it has contributed to our Access to Justice Toolkit, a dynamic resource available on the department’s website; and it will continue to encourage the kind of strong interagency cooperation that’s making a real difference in the lives of people across the country. 

For example, this coming fall – thanks to a partnership between our Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Department of Housing and Urban Development – HUD will offer a new grant to support collaborations between HUD-funded organizations, and civil legal aid programs and public defender offices.  These collaborations will focus on expunging and sealing juvenile records – thus improving the chances that reentering youth will be able to obtain degrees, find work, and secure housing. 

Beyond our formal interagency efforts, we’re also working to empower individual public servants to contribute in their spare time – so our employees can help lead by example. 

Through the federal government’s Pro Bono Program, we’re encouraging our agency partners to adopt policies – and help navigate internal restrictions – to make it easier for government lawyers to give back to their communities.  Thanks to the Justice Department’s Laura Klein – and the broad and enthusiastic support of our partners – no fewer than 30 federal agencies currently havepro bono policies encouraging their lawyers to dopro bono work.  The program is already operating in Washington D.C., San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and most recently Colorado.  And we’re working to expand it to U.S. Attorney’s Offices throughout the country – because we believe, as you do, that every legal professional must use his or her skills not simply to make a living, but to make a difference. 

Clearly, thanks to your leadership – and this Administration’s steadfast commitment – there can be no question that the last few years have been marked by real, tangible progress.  Yet we’ve also suffered budget cuts and other setbacks.  And the scope of the problem we face is astonishing.  Estimates suggest that more than 80 percent of civil legal needs go unmet among low-income people.  For every eligible person who receives help from a legal aid program, another eligible person is turned away.  In total, over 61 million Americans are eligible for civil legal aid, but only a fraction of that number can access it.  And despite the steps forward we’ve witnessed in recent years, I believe it’s incumbent on all of us, as individuals, as legal professionals, and as a nation, to do even more. 

That’s why the Administration – and the Justice Department in particular – is seeking new funds to increase our commitment to civil legal aid.  Our 2015 budget request calls for a brand-new $5 million competitive grant program to support the creation of integrated civil legal aid delivery systems across the country.  The request also allocates almost $3 million to build the department’s capacity for research and data collection related to civil legal aid. 

This is important funding that, if approved by Congress, would improve delivery methods and increase our understanding of this crisis.  By itself, though, I recognize that it still falls short of the level of support we desperately need.  And that’s why tonight – together – we need to go even further.

This evening, I am calling on Congress to come together in a bipartisan manner once more – just as they did 40 years ago, when LSC was created – to fund the Legal Services Corporation with $430 million in Fiscal Year 2015, an increase of 18 percent over 2014.  I’m calling on Congress to lift onerous restrictions that prevent LSC lawyers from filing class action lawsuits – and that apply obstructive guidelines to all funds, including private funds, raised by LSC grantees.  And I’m calling on Congress to stand with the diverse and nonpartisan group of leaders in this room – leaders from across the political spectrum and every segment of the legal profession – in addressing this urgent need; in advancing our commitment to equal justice; and in extending the full rights and protections of America’s legal system to everyone in this country.

This is not – and it has never been – a divisive or partisan issue.  It’s fundamentally an Americanissue.  It’s about the values that unite us, that drive LSC’s daily work, and that are central to our identity as a nation.  It’s about the promise that lies at the heart of America’s enduring pursuit of equal justice for all.  And it’s about the principles that have animated this country since its earliest days; that once inspired each of us to build a career in the service of the law; and that must drive our continuing efforts to ensure that access to justice is not a privilege afforded to a fortunate few, but the birthright – and the obligation – of every citizen. 

Now, like you, I’m under no illusions that – even if Congress provides this increased funding – we’ll be able to close the “justice gap” overnight, or easily bring about the progress we seek.  This work will continue to demand both courage and conviction.  It will require every resource we can bring to bear.  Never forget - positive change is not inevitable. It is the product of vision, hard work and perseverance. 

But as I look around this room tonight – at the group of dedicated attorneys and fierce advocates who have given so much to this cause over the last40 years – I cannot help but feel confident in where your leadership will take us over the next40.  I am honored to stand with you in this work.  Wherever I am, and whatever I do, I will always be proud to count you as colleagues and partners in this most just cause.  I wish you all a wonderful 40th anniversary and, on behalf of a grateful nation, express my deep appreciation for all your efforts to make ours a more perfect union.

Thank you.

18 Years of Kairos Webtexts: An interview with Douglas Eyman & Cheryl E. Ball

September 22, 2014 by Trevor Owens

Cheryl E. Ball, associate professor of digital publishing studies at West Virginia University, is editor of Kairos

Since 1996 the electronic journalKairos has published a diverse range of webtexts, scholarly pieces made up of a range of media and hypermedia. The 18 years of digital journal texts are both interesting in their own right and as a collection of complex works of digital scholarship that illustrate a range of sophisticated issues for ensuring long-term access to new modes of publication. Douglas Eyman, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University is senior editor and publisher of Kairos. Cheryl E. Ball, associate professor of digital publishing studies at West Virginia University, is editor of Kairos. In this Insights Interview, I am excited to learn about the kinds of issues that this body of work exposes for considering long-term access to born-digital modes of scholarship. [There was also a presentation on Kairos at the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting.]

Trevor: Could you describe Kairos a bit for folks who aren’t familiar with it? In particular, could you tell us a bit about what webtexts are and how the journal functions and operates?

Doug: Webtexts are texts that are designed to take advantage of the web-as-concept, web-as-medium, and web-as-platform. Webtexts should engage a range of media and modes and thedesign choices made by the webtext author or authors should be an integral part of the overallargument being presented. One of our goals (that we’ve met with some success I think) is to publish works that can’t be printed out — that is, we don’t accept traditional print-oriented articles and we don’t post PDFs. We publish scholarly webtexts that address theoretical, methodological or pedagogical issues which surface at the intersections of rhetoric and technology, with a strong interest in the teaching of writing and rhetoric in digital venues.

Douglas Eyman, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University is senior editor and publisher of Kairos

(As an aside, there was a debate in 1997-98 about whether we were publishinghypertexts, which then tended to be available in proprietary formats and platforms and not freely available on the WWW or not; founding editor Mick Doherty argued that we were publishing much more than only hypertexts, so we moved from calling what we published ‘hypertexts’ to ‘webtexts’ — Mick tells that story in the 3.1 loggingon column).

Cheryl: WDS (What Doug said  One of the ways I explain webtexts to potential authors and administrators is that the design of a webtext should, ideally, enact authors’ scholarly arguments, so that the form and content of the work are inseparable.

Doug: The journal was started by an intrepid group of graduate students, and we’ve kept a fairly DIY approach since that first issue appeared on New Year’s day in 1996. All of our staff contribute their time and talents and help us to publish innovative work in return for professional/field recognition, so we are able to sustain a complex venture with a fairly unique economic model where the journal neither takes in nor spends any funds. We also don’t belong to any parent organization or institution, and this allows us to be flexible in terms of how the editors choose to shape what the journal is and what it does.

Cheryl: We are lucky to have a dedicated staffwho are scattered across (mostly) the US: teacher-scholars who want to volunteer their time to work on the journal, and who implement the best practices of pedagogical models for writing studies into their editorial work. At any given time, we have about 25 people on staff (not counting the editorial board).

Doug: Operationally, the journal functions much like any other peer-reviewed scholarly journal: we accept submissions, review them editorially, pass on the ones that are ready for review to our editorial board, engage the authors in a revision process (depending on the results of the peer-review) and then put each submission through an extensive and rigorous copy-, design-, and code-editing process before final publication. Unlike most other journals, our focus on the importance of design and our interest in publishing a stable and sustainable archive mean that we have to add those extra layers of support for design-editing and code review: our published webtexts need to be accessible, usable and conform to web standards.

Trevor: Could you point us to a few particularly exemplary works in the journal over time for readers to help wrap their heads around what these pieces look like? They could be pieces you think are particularly novel or interesting or challenging or that exemplify trends in the journal. Ideally, you could link to it, describe it and give us a sentence or two about what you find particularly significant about it.

Cheryl: Sure! We sponsor an award every year for Best Webtext, and that’s usually where we send people to find exemplars, such as the ones Doug lists below.

Doug: From our peer-reviewed sections, we point readers to the following webtexts (the first two are especially useful for their focus on the process of webtext authoring and editing):

• Daniel Anderson, “Watch the Bubble” (2012)
• Susan H. Delagrange “When Revision Is Redesign: Key Questions for Digital Scholarship” (2009)
• David Rieder, “Typographia: A Hybrid, Alphabetic Exploration of Raleigh, NC” (2010)
• Madeleine Sorapure, “Between Modes: Assessing Students’ New Media Compositions” (2006)
• Melanie Yergeau, Kathryn Wozniak and Peter Vandenberg, “Expanding the Space of f2f: Writing Centers and Audio-Visual-Textual Conferencing” (2009)
• Scott Nelson et al’s, “Crossing Battle Lines: Teaching Multimodal Literacies through Augmented Reality Games” (2013)

Cheryl: From our editorially (internally) reviewed sections, here are a few other examples:

• Nathaniel Rivers’ “Circumnavigation: An Interview with Thomas Rickert” (a mid-career scholar who recently published an award-winning book) (2014)
• Jennifer deWinter et al’s review of “The Art of Video Games,” presented as a video game. (2014)
• Douglas Wall’s “An A-Word Production: Authentic Design,” a mini-manifesto for our short briefs section, Disputatio. (2008)
• Tara Wood and Shannon Madden’s “Suggested Practices for Syllabus Accessibility Statements,” published as part of our pedagogical tools and narratives section, PraxisWiki. (2013)

Trevor: Given the diverse range of kinds of things people might publish in a webtext, could you tell us a bit about the kinds of requirements you have enforced upfront to try and ensure that the works the journal publishes are likely to persist into the future? For instance, any issues that might come up from embedding material from other sites, or running various kinds of database-driven works or things that might depend on external connections to APIs and such.

Doug: We tend to discourage work that is in proprietary formats (although we have published our fair share of Flash-based webtexts) and we ask our authors to conform to web standards (XHTML or HTML5 now). We think it is critical to be able to archive any and all elements of a given webtext on our server, so even in cases where we’re embedding, for instance, a YouTube video, we have our own copy of that video and its associated transcript.

One of the issues we are wrestling with at the moment is how to improve our archival processes so we don’t rely on third-party sites. We don’t have a streaming video server, so we use YouTube now, but we are looking at other options because YouTube allows large corporations to apply bogus copyright-holder notices to any video they like, regardless of whether there is any infringing content (as an example, an interview with a senior scholar in our field was flagged and taken down by a record company; there wasn’t even any background audio that could account for the notice. And since there’s a presumption of guilt, we have to go through an arduous process to get our videos reinstated.) What’s worse is when the video *isn’t* taken down, but the claimant instead throws ads on top of our authors’ works. That’s actually copyright infringement against us that is supported by YouTube itself.

Another issue is that many of the external links in works we’ve published (particularly in older webtexts) tend to migrate or disappear. We used to replace these where we can with links to archive.org (aka The Wayback Machine), but we’ve discovered that their archive is corrupted because they allow anyone to remove content from their archive without reason or notice.[1] So, despite its good intentions, it has become completely unstable as a reliable archive. But we don’t, alas, have the resources to host copies of everything that is linked to in our own archives.

Cheryl: Kairos holds the honor within rhetoric and composition of being the longest-running, and most stable, online journal, and our archival and technical policies are a major reason for that. (It should be noted that many potential authors have told us how scary those guidelines look. We are currently rewriting the guidelines to make them more approachable while balancing the need to educate authors on their necessity for scholarly knowledge-making and -preservation on the Web.)

Of course, being that this field is grounded in digital technology, not being able to use some of that technology in a webtext can be a rather large constraint. But our authors are ingenious and industrious. For example, Deborah Balzhiser et al created an HTML-based interface to their webtext that mimicked Facebook’s interface for their 2011 webtext, “The Facebook Papers.” Their self-made interface allowed them to do some rhetorical work in the webtext that Facebook itself wouldn’t have allowed. Plus, it meant we could archive the whole thing on the Kairos server in perpetuity.

Trevor: Could you give us a sense of the scope of the files that make up the issues? For instance, the total number of files, the range of file types you have, the total size of the data, and or a breakdown of the various kinds of file types (image, moving image, recorded sound, text, etc.) that exist in the run of the journal thus far?

Doug: The whole journal is currently around 20 Gb — newer issues are larger in terms of data size because there has be an increase in the use of audio and video (luckily, html and css files don’t take up a whole lot of room, even with a lot of content in them). At last count, there are 50,636 files residing in 4,545 directories (this count includes things like all the system files for WordPress installs and so on). A quick summary of primary file types:

• HTML files:     12247
• CSS:               1234
• JPG files:        5581
• PNG:               3470
• GIF:                 7475
• MP2/3/4:         295
• MOV               237
• PDF:                191

Cheryl: In fact, our presentation at Digital Preservation 2014 this year [was] partly about the various file types we have. A few years ago, we embarked on a metadata-mining project for the back issues of Kairos. Some of the fields we mined for included Dublin Core standards such as MIMEtype and DCMIType. DCMIType, for the most part, didn’t reveal too much of interest from our perspective (although I am sure librarians will see it differently!!  but the MIMEtype search revealed both the range of filetypes we had published and how that range has changed over the journal’s 20-year history. Every webtext has at least one HTML file. Early webtexts (from 1996-2000ish) that have images generally have GIFs and, less prominent, JPEGs. But since PNGs rose to prominence (becoming an international standard in 2003), we began to see more and more of them. The same with CSS files around 2006, after web-standards groups starting enforcing their use elsewhere on the Web. As we have all this rich data about the history of webtextual design, and too many research questions to cover in our lifetimes, we’ve released the data in Dropbox (until we get our field-specific data repository, rhetoric.io, completed).

Trevor: In the 18 years that have transpired since the first issue of Kairos a lot has changed in terms of web standards and functionality. I would be curious to know if you have found any issues with how earlier works render in contemporary web browsers. If so, what is your approach to dealing with that kind of degradation over time?

Cheryl: If we find something broken, we try to fix it as soon as we can. There are lots of 404s to external links that we will never have the time or human resources to fix (anyone want to volunteer??), but if an author or reader notifies us about a problem, we will work with them to correct the glitch. One of the things we seem to fix often is repeating backgrounds. lol. “Back in the days…” when desktop monitors were tiny and resolutions were tinier, it was inconceivable that a background set to repeat at 1200 pixels would ever actually repeat. Now? Ugh.

But we do not change designs for the sake of newer aesthetics. In that respect, the design of a white-text-on-black-background from 1998 is as important a rhetorical point as the author’s words in 1998. And, just as the ideas in our scholarship grow and mature as we do, so do our designs, which have to be read in the historical context of the surrounding scholarship.

Of course, with the bettering of technology also comes our own human degradation in the form of aging and poorer eyesight. We used to mandate webtexts not be designed over 600 pixels wide, to accommodate our old branding system that ran as a 60-pixel frame down the left-hand side of all the webtexts. That would also allow for a little margin around the webtext. Now, designing for specific widths — especially ones that small — seems ludicrous (and too prescriptive), but I often find myself going into authors’ webtexts during the design-editing stage and increasing their typeface size in the CSS so that I can even read it on my laptop. There’s a balance I face, as editor, of retaining the authors’ “voice” through their design and making the webtext accessible to as many readers as possible. Honestly, I don’t think the authors even notice this change.

Trevor: I understand you recently migrated the journal from a custom platform to the Open Journal System platform. Could you tell us a bit about what motivated that move and issues that occurred in that migration?

Doug: Actually, we didn’t do that.

Cheryl: Yeah, I know it sounds like we did from our Digital Preservation 2014 abstract, and we started to migrate, but ended up not following through for technical reasons. We were hoping we could create plug-ins for OJS that would allow us to incorporate our multimedia content into its editorial workflow. But it didn’t work. (Or, at least, wasn’t possible with the $50,000 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant we had to work with.) We wanted to use OJS to help streamline and automate our editorial workflow–you know, the parts about assigning reviewers and copy-editors, etc., — and as a way to archive those processes.

I should step back here and say that Kairos has never used a CMS; everything we do, we do by hand — manually SFTPing files to the server, manually making copies of webtext folders in our kludgy way of version control, using YahooGroups (because it was the only thing going in 1998 when we needed a mail system to archive all of our collaborative editorial board discussions) for all staff and reviewer conversations, etc.–not because we like being old school, but because there were always too many significant shortcomings with any out-of-the-box systems given our outside-the-box journal. So the idea of automating, and archiving, some of these processes in a centralized database such as OJS was incredibly appealing. The problem is that OJS simply can’t handle the kinds of multimedia content we publish. And rewriting the code-base to accommodate any plug-ins that might support this work was not in the budget. (We’ve written about this failed experiment in a white paper for NEH.)

---

[1] Archive.org will obey robots.txt files if they ask not to be indexed. So, for instance, early versions of Kairos itself are no longer available on archive.org because such a file is on the Texas Tech server where the journal lived until 2004. We put that file there because we want Google to point to the current home of the journal, but we actually would like that history to be in the Internet Archive. You can think of this as just a glitch, but here’s the more pressing issue: if I find someone has posted a critical blog post of my work, if I ever get ahold of the domain it was originally posted, I can take it down there *and* retroactively make it unavailable on archive.org, even if it used to show up there. Even without such nefarious purpose, just the constant trade in domains and site locations means that no researcher can trust that archive when using it for history or any kind of digital scholarship.

DoD Supports Firefighting Efforts in California

From a U.S. Northern Command News Release

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo., Sept. 22, 2014 - Two Department of Defense C-130 aircraft equipped with U.S. Forest Service Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems and under the command and control of U.S. Northern Command will be assisting with wildfire suppression efforts in California and the Northwest Geographic Area at the request of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, Northcom officials said in a news release issued yesterday.

DoD assistance to the firefighting effort is slated to begin today, officials said.

The supporting unit flying the MAFFS mission is the, North Carolina Air National Guard's 145th Airlift Wing, located in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Northcom provides DoD capabilities for disaster response operations in support of the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Interagency Fire Center, and state and local officials and it continues to closely monitor wildfires to anticipate requests for DoD assistance.

Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard C-130 aircraft assigned to units in California, Colorado, North Carolina and Wyoming are capable of dropping fire retardant using U.S. Forest Service MAFFS units.

Aircrews, maintenance crews and support personnel undergo special NIFC training and certification to perform these missions each year.

HIGH HOLY DAYS SERVICES AND SPECIAL GUESTS

BEVERLY HILLS TEMPLE OF THE ARTS AT THE SABAN THEATRE,

RABBI DAVID BARON ANNOUNCES HIGH HOLY DAYS SERVICES

AND SPECIAL GUESTS FOR KOL NIDRE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2014 (5775)

AND FOR YOM KIPPUR SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2014 (5775)

Yom Kippur Guests To Include:

DAN GORDON

Direct for the front lines of the Gaza Wars, an Israeli Defense Force Reserve Officer.

Hollywood Screenwriter of the films The Hurricane, Wyatt Earp, Passenger 57, The Assignment and Murder in The First.  His plays include stage adaptations of Rain Man, Terms of Endearment and the Broadway Outer Circle Critics Awards nominated, Irena’s Vow.  Raised in Southern California and Kibbutz Ginnegar, in the Valley of Jezreel in Israel, Gordon has served in six wars.  He presently serves as a Captain in the Military Spokesperson Unit, and is involved with the current conflict in Hamas making headlines in the media around the world.

SALLY ENFIELD RABINOWITZ

Student Filmmaker who made a video documentary about her maternal great-grandparents, Hans and Alice Ehrenfeld, owners of a chain of gift stores in and around Frankfurt, Germany where Leica cameras were sold.  Her great-grandparents escaped via the Leitz Freedom Train from Nazi Germany to America in the late 1930s with the help of Ernst Leitz, founder of Leitz Cameras. At the age of 17, the now 20-year-old Rabinowitz traveled to Germany to preserve her family’s history and journey from persecution to freedom with the YouTube video, “One Family’s Story:  Surviving The Holocaust”

NONIE DARWISH

Egyptian-Arab-American Human Rights Activist and Critic of Islam, Founder of www.ArabsForIsrael.com and Co-Founder of www.FromerMuslimsUnited.com.  Feminist and Author of three books, Now They Call Me Infidel:  Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror; Cruel and Usual Punishment:  The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law and The Devil We Don’t Know:  The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East.  Daughter of an Egyptian Army Colonel Mustafa Hafez, who headed the Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and led the ‘Fedayeen’ operations against Israel under the leadership of President Nasser of Egypt.  Hafez was killed by the Israeli Defense Force in 1956.

ANTHONY (MORDECHAI-TZVI) RUSSELL

Gay African-American Opera Singer Specializing in the Performance of Yiddish Music who has worked in the field of opera for the past 15 years, culminating with a debut at the San Francisco Opera Company.  The singer, a bass, devotes himself to the repertoire of Sidor Belarsky, one of the twentieth century’s prolific performers of chazzanut, Chassidic nigunim and Yiddish song in concert venues around the world.  His partner of seven years is Rabbi Michel Rothbaum.

Yom Kippur Participants and Speakers Will Include:

GOLDA BERKMAN

14-year-old singer from the Hollywood High School of the Arts

JORDAN BENNETT

Cantor, Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre

(Lead in Les Misérables on Broadway)

SHARON FARBER

Emmy Award-Nominated Composer and Music Director,

Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre

CORKY HALE

World Renowned Jazz Harpist

MARY HART

Former American Television Personality for Entertainment Tonight

LEONARD MALTIN

Renowned American Film Critic and Historian

ILYSIA J. PIERCE

Cantor, Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre

(Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, First National Tour)

CHLOE TUCKER

Star of the North American Tour of the Broadway Musical, Mamma Mia!

Rabbi David Baron announced today Yom Kippur High Holy Day Services will be held at the Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre, the largest arts synagogue in the United States; 8440 Wilshire Boulevard; Beverly Hills, CA  90211 on the Eve of Yom Kippur (Kol Nidre) on Friday, October 3, 2014 (5775) at 8:00 p.m. and on Saturday, October 4, 2014 (5775) starting at 10:00 a.m. including a Yizkor Memorial Service (memorial service for the departed) starting at 12 Noon.
 
            Rabbi David Baron said, “My guests for this year’s Yom Kippur services will include:  Sally Enfield Rabinowitz,who at 17 years of age traveled to Germany to research and record her family’s personal history in the widely viewed YouTube video,‘One Family’s Story: Surviving The Holocaust;’ Anthony (Mordechai-Tzvi) Russell, a gay, African-American opera singer who converted to Judaism and is now specializing in the performance of Yiddish music; Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian-Arab-American Human Rights Activist and Founder of www.ArabsForIsrael.com; and Hollywood screenwriter Dan Gordon, who has served in six wars and currently returned from the conflict in Gaza.  All of my guests have incredible personal stories of acts of humane kindness, courageous deeds and of hope and determination in the face of oppression which are inspirational messages we all need to hear.”

            Baron continued, “Our services will feature the luminous talents of 14-year-old singer Golda Berkman from the Hollywood High School of the Arts; our temple’s cantors Ilysia J. Pierce and Jordan Bennett; our music director Sharon Farber; world renowned Jazz HarpistCorky Hale; celebrated television personalities Mary Hart and Leonard Maltin and singer Chloe Tucker, star of the National Tour of the Broadway musical,Mamma Mia!”

           Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) is the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar; it is a day of prayer and fasting for Jewish people around the world.  The Eve of Yom Kippur (Kol Nidre) on Friday, October 3rd, and Yom Kippur on Saturday, October 4th represent the end of a 10-day period of repentance.
 
            The Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre is now celebrating its 22nd Anniversary.  The temple was founded and incorporated on November 5, 1992.  Members of the media will be invited to interview the Rabbi’s special guests from 7:00 – 8:00 p.m., prior to the beginning of the service on the Eve of Yom Kippur (Kol Nidre) on Friday, October 3, 2014 (5775) and on Yom Kippur on Saturday, October 4, 2014(5775) during the day.

            The creative services will feature Broadway performers, Ilysia J. Pierce and Jordan Bennett, both of whom serve as cantors, along with the temple’s choir comprised of singers from the Los Angeles Opera and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, led by the temple’s Music Director and Emmy Award-nominated Composer, Sharon Farber.
 
            High Holy Day Services will be conducted in the Winnick Auditorium on the ornate Harold Kapelovitz bimah, given as a gift from Mrs. Lee Kapelovitz, in memory of her late husband.  The bimah design was envisioned by Rabbi David Baron, with the assistance of his wife Adrienne Baron and Bruce Ryan.  The goal was to create a dramatic living Jewish message of faith and peoplehood.  Through the Rabbi’s efforts the temple secured the exclusive rights to recreate the magnificent tapestry of the legendary artist, Marc Chagall, entitled “The Journey of the People.”  The original evocative work of art depicting the history of the Jewish people from Moses to King David hangs in Knesset in Jerusalem.  The art deco elements of the temple’s proscenium were incorporated into the design of the pillars, Holy Ark and pulpits.  Six backlit panels present 18 (chai) word concepts of Jewish faith and belief taken from the Torah.
 
The High Holy Day Services will include:
-      The sounding of the Shofar on the first of the High Holy Days, the Eve of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish New Year 5775 on Wednesday, September 24th at 8:00 p.m., believed to be the creation of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman.

-      On Kol Nidre (the Eve of Yom Kippur),on Friday, October 3rd, Special Guests,Sally Enfield Rabinowitz will speak, and singer Anthony (Mordechai-Tzvi) Russellwill perform.  The service begins at 8:00 p.m.

-      On Yom Kippur, Saturday, October 4th, services will begin at 10:00 a.m.  A Yizkor Memorial Service (memorial service for the departed) will begin at 12 Noon, followed by the Introduction of Rabbi’s Special Guests, Nonie Darwish, Dan Gordon andAnthony (Mordechai-Tzvi) Russell,followed by the West Coast Pre-Screening “Sneak Preview” of new documentary film.  The film screening will be followed by A Panel Discussion from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. The Closing Mincha/Neilah/Havdalah Service will begin at 5:45 p.m.

           Tickets for the services begin at a tax-deductible donation of $350.  Young Adult seating for ages 20 to 35 are available for a donation of $150.  Children’s services, led by Karen Abrams, will also be held on the morning of Rosh Hashanah on Thursday, September 25th at 10:00 a.m. and on the morning of Yom Kippur on Thursday, October 3rd at 10:00 a.m.  For more information, please call Kasey Carter at323-658-9100 or log on towww.templeofthearts.org.  Street parking restrictions have been lifted for the areas adjacent to the Saban Theatre.
 
           The mission of the Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre is to promote religion through music, drama, arts and dance.  Many of the artists in these various creative fields participate in the temple’s services.  To learn more about Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre, please visit the website, www.templeofthearts.org.  Network with us atwww.facebook.com/templeofthe arts and on Twitter @templeofthearts
 
           The Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts at the Saban Theatre also broadcasts its Yom Kippur service for the homebound on DIRECTV, Comcast, Time Warner and other cable channels through JLTV (Jewish Life Television).  JLTV can be viewed locally in Los Angles on Time Warner Channel 177.  For more information, please visit the website,www.jltv.tv.
 
More About Rabbi David Baron’s Yom Kippur Special Guests:
           Sally Enfield Rabinowitz is a student filmmaker who made a video documentary about her maternal great-grandparents, Hans and Alice Ehrenfeld, owners of a chain of gift stores in and around Frankfurt, Germany where Leica cameras were sold.  Her great-grandparents escaped via the Leitz Freedom Train from Nazi Germany to America in the late 1930s with the help of Ernst Leitz, founder of Leitz Cameras.  At the age of 17, the now 20-year-old Rabinowitz traveled to Germany to preserve her family’s history and journey from persecution to freedom with the YouTube video, “One Family’s Story: Surviving The Holocaust.” Rabinowitz traveled to Germany and London to do her research with the help of Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith.  She visited historical archives, cemeteries, the concentration camp, Buchenwald, and other places to uncover the historical details of her family saga.  She compiled the information with old family photos to make a video commentary.  Rabinowitz is currently a junior at Tulane University in New Orleans studying Communications and Studio Art.  To learn more, please visit thehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBkAVnWi6FE
 
            Anthony (Mordechai-Tzvi) Russellis a gay African-American opera singer specializing in the performance of Yiddish Music.  He has worked in the field of opera for the past 15 years, culminating with a debut at the San Francisco Opera Company.  The singer, a bass, devotes himself to the repertoire of Sidor Belarsky (1898-1975), one of the twentieth century’s prolific performers of chazzanut, Chassidic nigunim and Yiddish song.  His partner of seven years is Rabbi Michel Rothbaum.  Russell’s work in Yiddish music has brought him to the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, Symphony Space, the Ideacity Conference in Toronto, KlezKanada, the Montreal and Berkeley Jewish Music Festivals and Asheknaz Festival, a week-long celebration of the Jewish arts in Toronto.  At the Yom Kippur services Russell will perform the Yiddish song, “Gemore Nign” juxtaposed with the Negro Spiritual song “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” To learn more, please visithttps://sites.google.com/site/anthonyrussellbass/

           Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-Arab-American Human Rights Activist and Critic of Islam.  The Feminist is also the author of three books, Now They Call Me Infidel:  Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror; Cruel and Usual Punishment:  The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law and The Devil We Don’t Know:  The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East.  Darwish is the daughter of an Egyptian Army Colonel Mustafa Hafez, who headed the Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and led the ‘Fedayeen’ operations against Israel under the leadership of President Nasser of Egypt.  Hafez was killed by the Israeli Defense Force in 1956.  She foundedwww.ArabsForIsrael.com in 1994 to promote understanding, peace and a new paradigm for Arabs to view Israel.  Darwish is a senior Fellow at the Center For Security Policy.  In 2009, she co-foundedwww.FormerMuslimsUnited.org (FMU), which stands for freedom of religion and to protect the civil rights of people who were born in Islam and wish to leave their religion.  Darwish is a Middle East expert and covers topics related to human rights and women’s rights under Islamic law, the Arab Israeli conflict, terrorism and radical Islam and its agenda.  She has a degree in Sociology/Anthropology.  She has been published in the “Guardian” and “The Wall Street Journal” and has appeared on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, C-SPAN, BBC and Al Arabiya.  She has spoken before the European Parliament, members of the British House of Lords, and at institutions of higher education like:  Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, George Mason Law School, Cornell, New York University, Brown, Boston University, Virginia Tech, Tufts, Harvard Medical School, Purdue, UCLA, Hebrew University in Israel, American University, Wellesley and Carnegie Mellon, to name a few.  She has been featured in the documentary film,Obsession.
 
           Dan Gordon is a Hollywood Screenwriter of the films The Hurricane(Denzel Washington), Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner), Passenger 57 (Wesley Snipes), The Assignment (Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland, Ben Kingsley) and Murder in The First (Kevin Bacon).  His plays include stage adaptations of Rain Man, Terms of Endearment and the Broadway Outer Circle Critics Awards nominated, Irena’s Vow(Tovah Feldshuh).  He was raised in Southern California and in Kibbutz Ginnegar, in the Valley of Jezreel in Israel.  Gordon has served in the Israeli Defense Force as a Reserve Officer since 1973, originally as a sniper and squad leader in an armored infantry unit.  He presently serves as a Captain in the Military Spokesperson Unit.  He has served in six wars, including:  Yom Kippur War, Operation Defensive Shield, The Second Lebanon War, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense and Operation Protective Edge.  He is currently involved in the conflict in Hamas making headlines in the media around the world.
 

NASA’s Newest Mars Mission Spacecraft Enters Orbit around Red Planet

This animation depicts NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Image Credit: 

NASA

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft successfully entered Mars’ orbit at 10:24 p.m. EDT Sunday, Sept. 21, where it now will prepare to study the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere as never done before. MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars.

“As the first orbiter dedicated to studying Mars’ upper atmosphere, MAVEN will greatly improve our understanding of the history of the Martian atmosphere, how the climate has changed over time, and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability of the planet,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “It also will better inform a future mission to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s.”

After a 10-month journey, confirmation of successful orbit insertion was received from MAVEN data observed at the Lockheed Martin operations center in Littleton, Colorado, as well as from tracking data monitored at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) navigation facility in Pasadena, California. The telemetry and tracking data were received by NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna station in Canberra, Australia.

“NASA has a long history of scientific discovery at Mars and the safe arrival of MAVEN opens another chapter,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “Maven will complement NASA’s other Martian robotic explorers—and those of our partners around the globe—to answer some fundamental questions about Mars and life beyond Earth.”

Following orbit insertion, MAVEN will begin a six-week commissioning phase that includes maneuvering into its final science orbit and testing the instruments and science-mapping commands. MAVEN then will begin its one Earth-year primary mission, taking measurements of the composition, structure and escape of gases in Mars’ upper atmosphere and its interaction with the sun and solar wind.

"It's taken 11 years from the original concept for MAVEN to now having a spacecraft in orbit at Mars,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU/LASP). “I'm delighted to be here safely and successfully, and looking forward to starting our science mission."

The primary mission includes five “deep-dip” campaigns, in which MAVEN’s periapsis, or lowest orbit altitude, will be lowered from 93 miles (150 kilometers) to about 77 miles (125 kilometers). These measurements will provide information down to where the upper and lower atmospheres meet, giving scientists a full profile of the upper tier.

“This was a very big day for MAVEN,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.  “We’re very excited to join the constellation of spacecraft in orbit at Mars and on the surface of the Red Planet.  The commissioning phase will keep the operations team busy for the next six weeks, and then we’ll begin, at last, the science phase of the mission.  Congratulations to the team for a job well done today.”

MAVEN launched Nov. 18, 2013, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying three instrument packages. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California at Berkeley with support from CU/LASP and Goddard contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet. The Remote Sensing Package, built by CU/LASP, will identify characteristics present throughout the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of atomic particles.

MAVEN's principal investigator is based at CU/LASP. The university provided two science instruments and leads science operations, as well as education and public outreach, for the mission. The University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory also provided four science instruments for the mission. Goddard manages the MAVEN project. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. JPL provides navigation and Deep Space Network support, as well as Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

Celebration: MAVEN Arrives at Mars

09/21/2014 12:00 PM EDT

Members of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) team celebrate at the Lockheed Martin operations center in Littleton, Colorado, Sunday night, after getting confirmation that the spacecraft entered Mars' orbit. MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars, and will soon begin taking measurements of the composition, structure and escape of gases in Mars’ upper atmosphere and its interaction with the sun and solar wind. Credit: Lockheed M

F-15c Takes Off at Night