update: california’s refugio oil spill larger than estimated

Oil on the beach at Refugio State Park in Santa Barbara, California, on May 19, 2015. (U.S. Coast Guard)

Controversy is brewing over just how much crude oil fouled pristine beaches and ocean waters in the Golden State as a result of the Refugio oil spill in May 2015.

On February 17, a preliminary factual report issued by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration indicates an additional 1,000 barrels of oil may have ended up in our ocean. This puts the total spill volume at an estimated 3,400 barrels or 142,800 gallons.

That’s like having 16 trucks pull up to the beach and dumping every drop of oil into the Pacific Ocean to spread towards unique and irreplaceable places like the Naples Reef State Marine Conservation Area and Kashtayit State Marine Conservation Area, which was established to protect and celebrate the coastal culture practiced by Chumash Indians for millennia.

The federal regulators based its calculations on the purging of affected pipelines required as part of an investigation into what caused the spill. The Plains All-America Pipeline Company put the figure at 2,400 barrels (100,800 gallons), which was later raised to 2,860 barrels. Now a third-party investigator is working to reconcile the difference. Also of interest in the report is that 997 barrels of oil were recovered by the oil spill response—far lower than any estimate of the overall spill volume.

Read more...

how to make a profit while making a difference

a people with no place

The five mothers sitting on plastic chairs beside me were decidedly cool while I sweated in the heat that was building, even on what was a relatively cool Myanmar morning. They were dressed in beautiful saris and long, colorful skirts and headscarves, and smiled widely in welcome. Through translation from English to Burmese to a local dialect of Arabic, I explained I had come from the US to visit the Save the Children program here in this camp for internally displaced families and wanted to hear their stories… stories of how they came to be in a teeming, dirty camp only six miles from their homes in the nearby town. Homes they had not seen now for more than three years—homes that no longer existed after they were forced to leave.

One by one, they told me about their lives before – as a rice trader, a bicycle repair shop owner, and one lady whose livelihood was the family coconut mat and bamboo shop. Several were at home with young children. They described a past life of simple pleasures and peace, room for their children to grow up and a decent school for them to attend. Although all of them were poor, they worked hard to have enough to send their children to school, get medical help when needed, and make sure they had a childhood. That was before, what they call, “the events.”

Read more...

making time for tea

As I sip my tea this morning, I am faced with the message "say it straight, simple and with a smile" on the tag. My morning is often accompanied by thoughts like these or single words like "listen" and "enjoy." Though I often laugh it off, sometimes I cannot help but ponder the text as I sit. Why is my tea talking to me? Tea has always been thought to give messages through its leaves. Perhaps these little tags are meant to be an iteration of this tradition. Coffee does not talk. Rather, we grind it and hide it in a machine, absent from our finished product. Tea, on the other hand, we often let sit far beyond its advised amount of time. It dwells with us. We watch its leaves unfurl or the color change as the bag penetrates the water. And we are mesmerized. By giving us something to read, tea forces us to slow down and have a moment, if only for a moment.

America is a coffee culture. After all, we "run on Dunkin." What exactly does that phrase mean? That we are constantly on the move, needing to quickly get from one place to another, to quickly perform and produce, to stay awake. And we need caffeine and sugar to do that. Even coffee houses are often centers of productivity, and the beverages are just sweeter or more potent iterations of the same bean.

Read more...

are you brainstorming the right way for innovation?

Conventional wisdom says brainstorming works best when people from different departments or groups come together to think of new ideas or solve problems. But research from Sarah Kaplan, a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management, shows that diversity is not enough. What is also necessary is in-depth expertise of the topic at hand. Those two factors together result in truly innovative ideas and also yield the highest economic value.

Knowledge@Wharton recently spoke with Kaplan, who is a professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a former Wharton professor, to discuss her research. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Focus of the Research

I have been conducting research … on innovation, specifically as looked at through the patenting of technological innovations. I published a paper recently with a former doctoral student at the Rotman School, Keyvan Vakili — who’s now at the London Business School — called “The Double-Edged Sword of Recombination in Breakthrough Innovation.”

Read more...