Favorite Links Friday Week of August 12, 2016

Walker faces possible legal opposition for PFD cuts

Anchorage Democratic Senator Bill Wielechowski wants the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to defy Gov. Bill Walker’s veto roughly halving this year’s dividends.

If the veto stands, Wielechowski said he’s likely to sue to force the state to fully pay Permanent Fund dividends this fall.

Senator Wielechowski said Walker didn’t have the authority to veto PFD funds. In a letter sent Wednesday to Permanent Fund Corporation Chief Executive Officer Angela Rodell,

Wielechowski cites a state law that says the corporation shall transfer an amount set by a formula for dividends.

“You just simply can’t veto a statute, regardless of what appropriation is made or not,” Wielechowski said.

A Permanent Fund spokeswoman referred questions to the state Department of Law. Department spokeswoman Cori Mills said the state constitution requires that all annual state spending – including dividends – is subject to the governor’s veto.

“We’d rather not get involved in a lawsuit, but that’s his right as well as any other citizen’s right,” Mills said. [Read the Full Source Here]

State arts awards program seeks nominations

Nominations are open for the 2017 Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities, a program that recognizes contributions to the arts and humanities in Alaska.

People can nominate individuals, organizations or institutions in six categories. Those News Tilecategories are: The Alaska Studies Educator of the Year, individual artist, distinguished service to the humanities, arts education, Alaska Native arts, and business leadership in the arts.

Nominations are due by Sept. 15th. Award recipients will be selected from those nominations by the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and the Office of the Governor.

Recipients will be recognized in late January during a ceremony in Juneau.

You can find the online nomination form at akgovawards.org. [Source]

Google isn’t safe from Yahoo’s fate

Yahoo has been beaten up in the press for so long that it’s hard to remember how untouchable the company once appeared.

A fawning profile in Fortune magazine from 1998 outlined Yahoo’s commanding position. “Yahoo won the search engine wars and was poised for greater things,” the article concluded, wisely prefacing the remark by warning, “Let’s leave aside, for now, questions of whether Yahoo will be around in 10 years.” At the time, Yahoo was drawing a then-impressive 40 million users a month. By 2000, the figure would jump to 185 million.

We all know what happened next.

We’d also like to think that having witnessed Yahoo’s demise we would be better able to spot a company that was at peak valuation and about to begin a long-term unraveling, a company that was on the wrong side of major trends.

Would we, though? What if that company is Google, one of today’s untouchables? Yahoo went from a $125 billion valuation in 2000 to Verizon’s $4.83 billion acquisition in just 16 years. Could the same thing happen to Google, ahem, Alphabet, in 2032?

Google has a search monopoly. But search no longer has a monopoly on the way that people find and engage with content. Just as Facebook has surpassed Google in generating traffic to publishers, we are seeing the search bar slowly give way to a more organic process of discovery. As Seth Godin has explained, search is “the action of knowing what you want until you find it,” while discovery is “when the universe (or an organization or a friend) helps you encounter something you didn’t know that you were looking for.” Google is working from behind in this rapid evolution from basic search to organic discovery. [Full Source]

A Tattoo That Knows When You’re Drunk

Sometimes, after a few drinks, people get a tattoo. Now there’s a tattoo that can tell if you’ve had a few drinks. Best of all, it’s temporary.

Researchers at the Center for Wearable Sensors at the University of California, San Diego, have come up with a removable electronic tattoo that can sense your blood-alcohol level from the sweat on your skin and then send this information via Bluetooth to a smartphone or car computer.

The Skyn relies on “insensible” sweat, or trace amounts that you don’t even know you have. In an effort to get fast, accurate results with a one-time test while avoiding the pitfalls of breathalyzers, the UCSD device goes another route: It contains a small amount of pilocarpine, a medication normally used to treat dry mouth and other health problems. Applied topically, the drug induces a little sweat where the device’s electrodes can use it, letting the sensor get results in about 15 minutes.

The UCSD tattoo is attached to a flexible, inch-long circuit board for processing and relaying data. But Joseph Wang, one of the project scientists, says that the reusable board could probably be made much smaller with some additional engineering. He adds that the disposable tattoos cost just pennies to produce, and his lab is working on a version that works all day. [Full Source]

More adult Americans live with their parents and grandparents

Despite the end of the Great Recession, there’s been a surge in multigenerational households.

Both the number and share of Americans living in multigenerational family households has continued to rise in recent years, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. In 2014, a record 60.6 million people, or 19% of the U.S. population, lived in a multigenerational household, up from 42.4 million (17%) in 2009 and 27.5 million (12%) in 1980. Multigenerational families — households with two or more adult generations, or one that includes grandparents and grandchildren — is growing among nearly all racial groups and age groups, says D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer and editor at Pew.

There are some demographic reasons. The Asian and Hispanic populations are growing more rapidly than the white population, Cohn’s analysis of the latest U.S. Census Bureau data found, “and those groups are more likely than whites to live in multigenerational family households.” What’s more, foreign-born Americans are more likely than the U.S.-born people to live with multiple generations of family, and Asians and Hispanics are more likely than whites to be immigrants. Some 28% of Asians lived in multigenerational households versus 25% of Hispanics and African-Americans and 15% of Caucasians. [Full Source]

The Great Recession never ended, that is the greatest myth of the last 8 years...hence why the adults live with their parents...This is very reminiscent of the Soviet Union. This isn't a "racial" or "cultural" norm like the article purports...but because the economy is bad. Nobody...Nobody, regardless of race or culture wants to live with their parent's....they do it because they can't afford to live by themselves...