Marine biologist Tuck Hines and a local Chesapeake crabber narrate the fall of the blue crab, and what may be the start of a recovery. […]

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Jennifer Trask engages nature as both medium and subject matter, combining unexpected materials such as bone, vertebrae, butterfly wings, resin, metal, and antique frame fragments […]

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This article aims to encourage practitioners, young and seasoned, by enhancing their structure-determination toolboxes with a selection of tips and tricks on recognizing and handling aspects of data collection, structure modelling and refinement, and the interpretation of results.

In the first reported crystal structure involving the potential ligand N,N',N''-tris­(2-pyridin­yl)-1,3,5-benzene­tricarboxamide, inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules via their amide groups into slanted ladder-like chains. Only two of the three amide groups in the mol­ecule are involved in hydrogen bonding, which influences the degree of out-of-plane twisting at each amide group.

The structural and nonlinear optical properties of a new anilinium hybrid crystal of chemical formula (C6H7NCl+·NO3−)3 have been investigated. The crystal structure was determined from single-crystal X-ray diffraction measurements performed at a temperature of 100 K which show that the compound crystallizes in a noncentrosymmetric space group (Pna21). The structural analysis was coupled with Hirshfeld surface analysis to evaluate the contribution of the different intermolecular interactions to the formation of supramolecular assemblies in the solid state that exhibit nonlinear optical features. This analysis reveals that the studied compound is characterized by a three-dimensional network of hydrogen bonds and the main contributions are provided by the O...H, C...H, H...H and Cl...H interactions, which alone represent ∼85% of the total contributions to the Hirshfeld surfaces. It is noteworthy that the halogen...H contributions are quite comparable with those of the H...H contacts. The nonlinear optical properties were investigated by nonlinear diffuse femtosecond-pulse reflectometry and the obtained results were compared with those of the reference material LiNbO3. The hybrid crystals exhibit notable second (SHG) and third (THG) harmonic generation which confirms its polarity is generated by the different intermolecular interactions. These measurements also highlight that the THG signal of the new anilinium compound normalized to its SHG counterpart is more pronounced than for LiNbO3.

In the first reported crystal structure involving the potential ligand N,N',N''-tris(pyridin-2-yl)benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxamide, C24H18N6O3, intermolecular N—H...O hydrogen bonds link the molecules via their amide groups into slanted ladder-like chains, in which the uprights of the ladder are formed by the hydrogen-bonding interactions and the benzene ring cores of the molecules act as the rungs of the ladder. Only two of the three amide groups in the molecule are involved in hydrogen bonding and this influences the degree of out-of-plane twisting at each amide group, with the twist being more significant for those amide groups participating in hydrogen bonds.

In small-molecule single-crystal structure determination, we now have at our disposal an inspiring range of fantastic diffractometers with better, brighter sources, and faster, more sensitive detectors. Faster and more powerful computers provide integrated tools and software with impressive graphical user interfaces. Yet these tools can lead to the temptation not to check the work thoroughly and one can too easily overlook tell-tale signs that something might be amiss in a structure determination; validation with checkCIF is not always revealing. This article aims to encourage practitioners, young and seasoned, by enhancing their structure-determination toolboxes with a selection tips and tricks on recognizing and handling aspects that one should constantly be aware of. Topics include a pitfall when setting up data collections, the usefulness of reciprocal lattice layer images, processing twinned data, tips for disorder modelling and the use of restraints, ensuring hydrogen atoms are added to a model correctly, validation beyond checkCIF, and the derivation and interpretation of the final results.

An efficient synthesis of 1-aryl­isochromeno[3,4-d][1,2,3]triazol-5(1H)-ones, involving the diazo­tization of 3-amino-4-aryl­amino-1H-isochromen-1-ones in weakly acidic solution, has been developed and the spectroscopic characterization and crystal structures of four examples are reported. The mol­ecules of 1-phenyl­isochromeno[3,4-d][1,2,3]triazol-5(1H)-one, C15H9N3O2, (I), are linked into sheets by a combination of C—H⋯N and C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, while the structures of 1-(2-methyl­phen­yl)isochromeno[3,4-d][1,2,3]triazol-5(1H)-one, C16H11N3O2, (II), and 1-(3-chloro­phen­yl)isochromeno[3,4-d][1,2,3]triazol-5(1H)-one, C15H8ClN3O2, (III), each contain just one hydrogen bond which links the mol­ecules into simple chains, which are further linked into sheets by π-stacking inter­actions in (II) but not in (III). In the structure of 1-(4-chloro­phen­yl)isochromeno[3,4-d][1,2,3]triazol-5(1H)-one, (IV), isomeric with (III), a combination of C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π(arene) hydrogen bonds links the mol­ecules into sheets. When com­pound (II) was exposed to a strong acid in methanol, qu­anti­tative conversion occurred to give the ring-opened transesterification product methyl 2-[4-hy­droxy-1-(2-methyl­phen­yl)-1H-1,2,3-triazol-5-yl]benzoate, C17H15N3O3, (V), where the mol­ecules are linked by paired O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds to form centrosymmetric dimers.

An operationally simple and time-efficient approach has been developed for the synthesis of racemic N-substituted 3-(2-aryl-2-oxoeth­yl)-3-hy­droxy­indolin-2-ones by a piperidine-catalysed aldol reaction between aryl methyl ketones and N-alkyl­isatins. These aldol products were used successfully as strategic inter­mediates for the preparation of N-substituted (E)-3-(2-hetaryl-2-oxo­ethyl­idene)indolin-2-ones by a stereoselective dehydration reaction under acidic conditions. The products have all been fully characterized by 1H and 13C NMR spectroscopy, by mass spectrometry and, for a representative selection, by crystal structure analysis. In each of (RS)-1-benzyl-3-hy­droxy-3-[2-(4-meth­oxy­phen­yl)-2-oxoeth­yl]indolin-2-one, C24H21NO4, (Ic), and (RS)-1-benzyl-3-{2-[4-(di­methyl­amino)­phen­yl]-2-oxoeth­yl}-3-hy­droxy­indolin-2-one, C25H24N2O3, (Id), inversion-related pairs of mol­ecules are linked by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds to form R22(10) rings, which are further linked into chains of rings by a combination of C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π(arene) hydrogen bonds in (Ic) and by C—H⋯π(arene) hydrogen bonds in (Id). The mol­ecules of (RS)-1-benzyl-3-hy­droxy-3-[2-oxo-2-(pyridin-4-yl)eth­yl]indolin-2-one, C22H18N2O3, (Ie), are linked into a three-dimensional framework structure by a combination of O—H⋯N, C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π(arene) hydrogen bonds. (RS)-3-[2-(Benzo[d][1,3]dioxol-5-yl)-2-oxoeth­yl]-1-benzyl-3-hy­droxy­indolin-2-one, C24H19NO5, (If), crystallizes with Z' = 2 in the space group Poverline{1} and the mol­ecules are linked into com­plex sheets by a combination of O—H⋯O, C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π(arene) hydro­gen bonds. In each of (E)-1-benzyl-3-[2-(4-fluoro­phen­yl)-2-oxo­ethyl­idene]indolin-2-one, C23H16FNO2, (IIa), and (E)-1-benzyl-3-[2-oxo-2-(thiophen-2-yl)ethylidene]indolin-2-one, C21H15NO2S, (IIg), the mol­ecules are linked into simple chains by a single C—H⋯O hydrogen bond, while those of (E)-1-benzyl-3-[2-oxo-2-(pyridin-4-yl)ethyl­idene]indolin-2-one, C22H16N2O2, (IIe), are linked by three C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds to form sheets which are further linked into a three-dimensional structure by C—H⋯π(arene) hydrogen bonds. There are no hydrogen bonds in the structures of either (E)-1-benzyl-3-[2-(4-meth­oxy­phen­yl)-2-oxo­ethyl­idene]indolin-2-one, C24H19NO3, (IIc), or (E)-1-benzyl-5-chloro-3-[2-(4-chloro­phen­yl)-2-oxo­ethyl­idene]indolin-2-one, C23H15Cl2NO2, (IIh), but the mol­ecules of (IIh) are linked into chains of π-stacked dimers by a combination of C—Cl⋯π(arene) and aromatic π–π stacking inter­actions.

A large The Actor statue is placed on stage during 21st Annual SAG Awards Behind The Scenes At The Shrine Auditorium Jan. 23, 2015 in Los Angeles.; Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Click here for KPCC's Awards Tracker

This Sunday's Screen Actors Guild Awards aren't as high profile as the Academy Awards, or even the Golden Globes, but they serve as one of the best predictors of who's going to take home a gold statue come Oscar night. Here's why.

Who votes for the SAG Awards?

SAG Award nominees are chosen by a committee of about 2,100 of the guild's members, according to awards news site Gold Derby. Then, all of the 111,228 members of the Guild have the chance to vote for their picks.

Meanwhile, the acting nominees for the Academy Awards are chosen by the 1,100 members in the Academy's actors branch, before being voted on by the Academy's full 5,700 members. Those actors are all part of SAG, so you're likely to see a strong correlation most years between the awards, particularly in the acting category.

How often do the SAG Awards predict the Oscar winners?

The SAG Awards have proven to be the best Oscar predictor in the acting category of any other major awards season prize since they began in 1995, both in nominations and winners. Of the 20 nominations and four winners from each shows, the overlap between the SAG Awards (aka "the Actors") and the Academy Awards in the last few years:

• 2009: 18 nominations; 3 winners
• 2010: 19 nominations; all 4 winners
• 2011: 17 nominations; all 4 winners
• 2012: 16 nominations; 3 winners
• 2013: 15 nominations; 3 winners
• 2014: 14 nominations; all 4 winners

This year, 17 nominees crossed over between the awards shows, with the Oscars matching up on all five nominations for best supporting actor and four of the five nominations in the other three acting categories.

Where have the SAG Awards differed from the Oscars?

SAG voters have lined up with the Academy on Best Actor 16 out of 20 times. The last time they differed from the Oscars was 2003, when Johnny Depp won at the SAG Awards for "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" before Sean Penn took the statue home at the Oscars for "Mystic River."

For Best Actress, SAG last split from Oscar in 2011, going with Viola Davis for "The Help" over eventual Oscar winner Meryl Streep for "The Iron Lady." They've matched up 14 out of 20 years.

In the supporting categories, the SAG Awards haven't fared as well. They went 12 for 20 in Best Supporting Actor, and 13 for 20 in Best Supporting Actress. That one also has an asterisk — one of those was a tie, so if you don't count that one, they're also only 12 for 20.

What does this all mean for the Oscars?

The SAG Awards remain the ones to watch when it comes to the acting awards — though their Best Ensemble category, the SAG Awards version of Best Picture, doesn't have a particularly strong correlation to the Oscars Best Picture winner. (For that, you'll want to watch for the Producers Guild Awards.)

We're tracking awards season and what experts are predicting; see KPCC's Awards Tracker below or click here to see the full page. You can watch the Screen Actors Guild Awards this Sunday at 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern on both TBS and TNT.

Disclosure: Mike Roe, along with other members of KPCC's staff, are members of the Screen Actors Guild as part of their employment with KPCC.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A Landau theory for the wurtzite-based heterovalent ternary semiconductor ZnSnN2 is developed and a first-order reconstructive phase transition is proposed as the cause of observed crystal structure disorder. The model infers that the phase transition is paraelectric to antiferroelectric.

Aline A. Alves
Apr 15, 2020; 0:jcs.242271v1-jcs.242271
Articles

Full Text:

Bridges make travel faster and more convenient, but, in an earthquake, these structures are subject to forces that can cause extensive damage and make them unsafe. Now civil and environmental engineer Petros Sideris of Texas A&M University is leading a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research project to investigate the performance of hybrid sliding-rocking (HSR) columns. HSR columns provide the same support as conventional bridge infrastructure columns but are more earthquake-resistant. HSR columns are a series of individual concrete segments held together by steel cables that allow for controlled sliding and rocking. This allows the columns to shift without damage, while post-tensioning strands ensure that at the end of an earthquake the columns are pushed back to their original position. Conventional bridges are cast-in-place monolithic concrete elements that are strong but inflexible. Structural damage in these bridge columns, typically caused by a natural disaster, often forces a bridge to close until repairs are completed. But bridges with HSR columns can withstand large earthquakes with minimal damage and require minor repairs, likely without bridge closures. Such infrastructure helps with post-disaster response and recovery and can save thousands in taxpayer dollars. In an earthquake, HSR columns provide "multiple advantages to the public," Sideris said. "By preventing bridge damage, we can maintain access to affected areas immediately after an event for response teams to be easily deployed, and help affected communities recover faster. In mitigating losses related to post-event bridge repairs and bridge closures, more funds can be potentially directed to supporting the recovery of the affected communities." According to Joy Pauschke, NSF program director for natural hazards engineering, "NSF invests in fundamental engineering research so that, in the future, the nation's infrastructure can be more resilient to earthquakes, hurricanes, and other forces of nature."

Image credit: Texas A&M University

Source: Streetwise Reports   05/07/2020

Streetwise Reports: Let's start with gold, which has seen an impressive rise in the last few months as the broader markets have declined on the back of the coronavirus pandemic. What do you think is ahead for the metal?

Frank Holmes: There is a short-term view and a long-term view. What's really hard for so many investors and asset allocators to recognize is that gold bullion since 2000 has far outperformed the S&P 500. In fact, of the last 20 years, in 16 of those years gold has been positive. So if we look at the numbers, it's double what the S&P 500 has done for the past 20 years.

With gold, there's the fear trade and the love trade. The love trade is 60% of the demand and it is long-term demand. The fear trade is short-term demand, and it's about 40%. Right now, we're living with fear that's really dominating the markets. The two factors that go with that are negative real interest rates and the amount of debt being printed by the government. So whenever you have the combination of a rising Fed balance sheet with Quantitative Easing 1, 2 and 3, buying junk bonds, whatever they're doing in the stock markets to try and provide liquidity, as that flows dramatically so does the price of gold.

Typically and most significant, in every country in the world we have found that when you have negative real interest rates, gold goes up in that country's currency. Take the yield on 10-year government bonds and subtract the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) number; if it's a positive return, gold is not attractive as an asset class. But if it's a negative real rate of return, gold appreciates in that country's currency.

When gold went to $1,900 in September of 2011, the 10-year government bond had a negative real rate of return of -300 basis points. Then five years later, the price of gold went down to $1,100 and real interest rates were +2% over the CPI number. So you had a variant swing from -3 to +2, which is 500 basis, and that's why gold corrected. Since then, we've had these periods now, and particularly in the past year, of negative real interest rates in America. That's how gold started staging a rally, which started about this time last year, peaked in August, sold off and now it's coming back again.

The Federal Reserve said recently it's going to keep rates basically at 0. The CPI is still running more than 1%. In fact, we could get big food inflation, the way it looks, for beef, chicken, etc. Inflation could have a big impact on negative real interest rates, and gold is moving higher.

So short term, it's all about real negative interest rates. As long as they stay negative, then we're going to see gold go up in the U.S. dollar. It could go up against the euro, against any country's currency.

I mentioned earlier that 60% of gold demand is love, and it predominantly comes from China and India. China and India are 40% of the world's population, and if you throw in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, we're now talking about 50% of the world's population. They give gold for weddings and for birthdays, and there's a strong correlation of rising gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in those countries for the past 20 years, and rising gold consumption.

China and India comprise approximately 50% of the world's gold demand GDP per capita. Indian women wear six times the amount of gold on their bodies than what is in Fort Knox, and they predominantly wear 24 karat, minimum 22 karat, gold jewelry. It's protected them from bad governments and bad government policies.

SR: What do you see happening with silver?

FH: Silver has more industrial applications than gold, so silver is like a warrant on gold. If a stock takes off and there's an option or a warrant in the money, it explodes and goes up much more percentage-wise. It has greater volatility. Every 10% move in gold usually translates to a 15% move in silver, up or down. And with this fear that's been taking place with negative interest rates and the calamity of money printing around the world, what we see now is that silver didn't move at first. Silver has always lagged.

SR: Do you recommend that the individual investor hold gold bullion?

FH: Yes. I think the easiest way is the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD). Or if you want to buy the physical gold insured, go to a reliable site like Kitco, and you can take physical delivery.

There is a company called Mene Inc. (MENE:TSX.V; MENEF:OTCMKTS) at mene.com. It sells 24-karat gold jewelry with only a 10% markup. And it will buy back your gold jewelry at a 10% discount to the price of gold if you ever want to sell it back. That's the business model. It will deliver throughout the U.S., I think using Brinks for delivery of simple gold jewelry.

SR: Let's talk about bitcoin for a moment and how that fits into a portfolio.

FH: I am the chairman of HIVE Blockchain, which became the first real cryptomining company. We are mining using green energy, surplus energy in Iceland, Sweden and now Quebec, which sells electricity to New York state. Quebec has a surplus of it. So we started mining these coins.

What I found is that the Bitcoin is very different than Ethereum. Bitcoin is going to become, to me, like Andy Warhol's art. If you look at the original paintings of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, when he came out with his prints in different colors, they came out at $1,000, went up to $10,000, fell, went up to $50,000, fell, went up to $100,000 and went to $125,000—because there are just more people, widened GDP, over time, and then they become art collectors. I think that if you have an original Bitcoin that's never been traded, it's going to be in that space.

The other part is that cryptocurrency is very new, and digital money is going to only grow. Blockchain technology is a superior piece of technology. What we saw was that Bitcoin bottomed a little over a year ago. Then it rallied, it went up to $14,000. All the central banks got worried. They knocked it down, and it's making a comeback.

Bitcoin, in mid-May, is going to halve production. There's a limited number of Bitcoins allowed to be ever created. The methodology when you mine them is you get new Bitcoins. They're called genesis or virgin coins. The number of coins you get every time you mine is going to halve. So the supply is going to shrink dramatically. A thought process with that is that Bitcoin will trade higher, probably above $10,000. Bitcoin is very speculative, just like buying Andy Warhol's art early.

I think that anyone who looks at Bitcoin or Ethereum must recognize that the daily volatility is four times the S&P 500 and gold. Thirty percent of the time gold or the S&P can go up or down 1%. For Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's 4–5%. Cryptocurrency is a huge secular trend, but it's going to be volatile.

SR: How do you feel about gold stocks? Are you looking at seniors or juniors or both? What should investors be looking at?

FH: For the first time in a long time, I'm becoming very bullish on gold stocks. I've been very negative on gold mining companies for over a decade now, for raising capital and actually destroying value per share. But over the decade, new boards of directors and new chief executive officers have come on, and there's become a greater discipline on cash flow returns rather than on cash flow, revenue per share growth, cash flow per share growth, rising dividends, all the normal things you buy a Starbucks or any great company for. It's the capacity to have revenue growth. Mining companies did a lot of silly mergers and acquisitions work, with which they destroyed capital, but that has changed.

During this past decade I've been a big advocate of royalty companies, such as Franco-Nevada Corp. (FNV:TSX; FNV:NYSE), Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. (WPM:TSX; WPM:NYSE), Royal Gold Inc. (RGLD:NASDAQ; RGL:TSX). These three had the highest revenue per employee in the world.

Franco-Nevada has a royalty on Newmont Goldcorp Corp. (NEM:NYSE) and Barrick Gold Corp.'s (ABX:TSX; GOLD:NYSE) joint venture assets in Nevada. The revenue per employee at Franco-Nevada is over $20 million. For Barrick or Newmont, it's $500,000 of revenue per employee. Goldman Sachs has $1 million of revenue per employee. So these royalty firms are very efficient companies. If you look at the past decade, Franco-Nevada has far outperformed Berkshire Hathaway. It has far outperformed any gold stock. It's because it's showing revenue per share growth, cash flow per share growth, over the rolling one year over three years on a consistent basis.

What's now happening is we have new management for these other gold stocks. The big move in gold stocks occurs when the generalists start to buy the sector. They've not been owning the underweight gold stocks because of the bad discipline by management and boards or silly acquisitions. Now what we're seeing, for the past three years, through the end of March, we're going to see the one year revenue growth over two years strong. Now you get 36 months of a strong growth in revenue and cash flow from the industry, and all of a sudden, generalists show up. When you start seeing more and more of the stocks in that industry showing free cash flow, the generalists start to show up.

The coronavirus this past quarter hurt the S&P 1500 stocks because the majority of them had free cash flow yields of about 4%, and they got evaporated, obliterated, because of this global shutdown. But the gold stocks didn't. They actually have rising free cash flow. They're going to show this quarter the price of gold is up, some of them had shut-ins for very temporary periods of time but their revenue, their cash flow, as a whole is going to truly outshine the overall industry. And when the quants and the fundamentalists start looking at where their growth is, these stocks are going to show up.

I did an analysis of only looking at free cash flow and picked the 10 gold stocks every quarter that had the highest free cash flow yield. And I sold them and bought them every quarter. I far outperformed any gold index. So that discipline shows up as a key metric to attract the quant fund or the generalist. When I look at my data—the two-year number is so important—I'm becoming very bullish on gold stocks.

When we talk about the names, my bias is U.S. Global GO GOLD and Precious Metal Miners ETF (GOAU). I launched this several years ago as a smart quant approach to picking gold stocks. It has three royalty companies that we talked about, Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious and Royal Gold. They're 30% of that ETF. They rebalance every quarter.

Then all the other names, they go down to a $200 million market cap but they have to be able to show the highest cash flow returns on invested capital. Once they do something silly or stupid, they're thrown out. Back testing, that model has outperformed the VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX) and the VanEck Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF (GDXJ) just on a basket of 60 gold stocks. This only has 28 names. Since I launched it, it's far outperformed on a rolling 12-month basis. It's smart data, and it dynamically recalibrates every quarter.

If you want to buy the individual names, then I would focus on those three big royalty companies. Thereafter, I would focus on those companies that have this metric I talk about, free cash flow yields. Out of the 100 gold stocks in the world that we follow, there are only about 14 of them that really have attractive free cash flow yields. What's interesting is that Barrick and Newmont—and Newmont's part of the S&P 500—does have a free cash flow yield that is positive, so you're seeing it has really done exceptionally well this past quarter because it has an attractive free cash flow yield and has not been hurt by the coronavirus.

SR: Let's switch gears for a moment. U.S. Global Funds runs the Jets ETF, an airline ETF. Obviously, the airlines have been battered. Do you see them coming back? Do you see bankruptcies?

FH: I think that the government agencies and the politicians have learned a lot from two big corrections: the 9/11 correction and 2008–2009. When you look at this industry, the Federal Aviation Administration says that 1 in 15 people is associated with the airline industry. That's huge. When you look at the multiplying effect of the airline industry, it's massive, just as housing is. One dollar for housing is worth $16 approximately. So when it comes to airlines, we're talking a double digit number of multiplying effect.

What's happened is that the government has been very smart this time to say we must make sure that we don't unwind this industry as we've done in previous times. So I think there's going to be a faster turnaround from the bailout policies.

What's happened with the airlines is they have ancillary revenue that has been very significant in the past five years. Some $20 billion of revenue then went to $100 billion of revenue, which covers a lot of costs. It aggravates you and me when we fly: change fees, baggage fees, but all these fees have let the airlines not be victimized by the price of oil because every time the price of oil went up, airline stocks fell. Every time oil went down, airlines went up. It was this inverse relationship that took place. Oil has represented less and less of ancillary fees. Now what's happened on this correction is not only the ancillary fees and everything have fallen, but oil has crashed. So airlines' biggest cost is way, way down. That means when they turn, and they come out of this correction, they have huge upside. Not only do they have the support of the government, they have the ability to start adding on these fees.

Because of the bailouts, airlines are not going to be able to buy back their stocks and they're not going to be increasing their dividends in this process. But that doesn't matter. Their revenue capacity per share is explosive. So I think that that's a very big difference.

SR: Anything else that you would like to talk to our readers about in this period of extreme volatility and uncertainty?

FH: Yes, bad news is good news. There's the optimism of trying to find who's going to be the solution to the problem. Had the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used Google and Amazon technology, they probably could've adapted faster to this coronavirus. Amazon hired 100,000 people. It's amazing that in all that negative news, it adapted the fastest. It's trying to understand how capital markets morph. There are certain industry leaders. I love Clorox. I don't think that stock is going to be given away. I think it's one of those just steady dividend payer and growing dividend stocks. So it's in the negative news where you can find opportunities besides airlines, besides gold. You can turn around and find these other pockets.

SR: Thank you, Frank. I appreciate your time today.

Frank Holmes is CEO and chief investment officer at U.S. Global Investors, which manages a diversified family of funds specializing in natural resources, emerging markets and gold and precious metals. In 2016, Holmes and portfolio manager Ralph Aldis received the award for Best Americas Based Fund Manager from the Mining Journal. In 2011 Holmes was named a U.S. Metals and Mining "TopGun" by Brendan Wood International, and in 2006, he was selected mining fund manager of the year by the Mining Journal. He is also the co-author of The Goldwatcher: Demystifying Gold Investing. More than 30,000 subscribers follow his weekly commentary in the award-winning Investor Alert newsletter, which is read in over 180 countries. Holmes is a much sought-after keynote speaker at national and international investment conferences. He is also a regular commentator on the financial television networks CNBC, Bloomberg, BNN and Fox Business, and has been profiled by Fortune, Barron's, The Financial Times and other publications.

Disclosure:
1) Patrice Fusillo conducted this interview for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an employee. She owns, or members of her immediate household or family own, shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: None. She is, or members of her immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None.
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Dried and cracked earth is visible on an unplanted field at a farm on April 29, 2014 near Mendota, California. ; Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• Summer is upon us, and KPIX in San Francisco reports three years of drought in the Central Valley has turned America's salad bowl into a "dust bowl." (KPIX)
• Speaking of summer and San Francisco, it appears denizens of the City by the Bay have done such a good job of conserving water, their water agency has already decided there will be no mandatory restrictions this summer. (San Jose Mercury News)
• Meanwhile, SFGate columnist Mark Morford wonders how water availability will factor into property values for summer get-aways north of San Francisco:

Wait, what? Right, the water. The Looming Issue. The Unexpected Fear. Water – or rather, the potential lack thereof – is something I didn’t realize I’d be quite so worried about when I started my search. But now? It’s damn near unavoidable. (SFGate)

• "As the Water Bond Turns" continues in Sacramento. In the latest episode, Gov. Brown stops playing hard to get and decides to commit, but will he find a willing (political) partner? Stay Tuned. (Sacramento Bee)

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Beatrice the Biologist / Scientific American

Today's dryku:
Food budgets are tight
Droughts do raise vegetables' price
But don't make snakes bite

Food:

• The USDA released its monthly food price outlook. Looks like prices are going to be up at least 3.5%. Fresh fruit could go up by 6%. Bloomberg has a chart showing how produce is projected to hit its highest price in 18 years. (LA Times)

Critters:

• Southern California seems to be seeing a higher rate of rattlesnake bites this year. Despite the article's headline, experts in the story say it's not because of the drought. A shorter winter has brought snakes out of hibernation earlier, meaning a longer active season, meaning more need for anti-venin.

As of June 12, 128 people were admitted to a hospital for a snakebite and of those, 93 received doses of anti-venin, Heard said. In 2013, 269 Californians went to a hospital for a snakebite and of those, 166 received anti-venin, he said. Simply doubling the number of patients needing anti-venin treatment would equal 186, more than 2013. (Some patients get “dry bites” meaning no venom is injected and therefore do not need anti-venin, he said). (Contra Costa Times)

• It's been a mixed bag for salmon this year. Some have needed to be trucked out to the ocean, because their streams are too dry. In the case of coho salmon, the drought has actually caused a record number to enter the ocean. It's not all good news though:

Biologists say that only 206 salmon egg clusters, known as "redds," were counted in the Lagunitas this year, well below the 20-year average of 250 "redds." And the fish that headed off to the ocean may not fare as well. They are smaller than normal and could face more difficult ocean conditions due to the warming pattern known as El Niño, scientists say. (Chico Enterprise-Record)

Fireworks:

• Sacramento cops are out in force, looking for illegal fireworks. The sheriff's department will double its number of officers on the hunt. Starting this week, having the little fire starters can mean jail time. (CBS Sacramento)

Water jerks:

• Everyone seems to be at a loss on how to get people to start saving water. Beatrice the Biologist may have stumbled onto the answer — it's a mixture of shame and badges. I'm going to print out the car one and post it in my window. Maybe then people will stop judging me for my filthy Camry. (Scientific American)

How has your community been affected by the drought? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

This is a public service campaign suggesting you save water...and suggesting some other things too. ; Credit: SFPUC

Friday's news is going to make you wait for it...when it comes to an explanation for the picture above.

The Wall Street Journal takes on pricing and other big-think policies that various authors claim are worsening the drought.

• Those higher food prices Jed wrote about yesterday? Alyssia Finley, assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com, says they're the fault of environmentalists, and higher food prices will be the way the rest of the country will pay for California's "green sanctimony." (WSJ)
• Economist Edward Lazear argues that "government-dictated prices, coupled with restrictions on the transfer of water, have made a bad situation much worse." He takes aim at the state's limitations on water transfers (lifted, he doesn't note; but he argues that pricing distorts the need for transfers anyway). He argues that public agencies that protect environmental conditions with water should pay for the privilege:

Although there may be good reasons to ensure that some fish and wildlife be protected, we should not pretend that this protection is costless. Agencies that divert water for environmental purposes should be required to budget explicitly for the lost revenue associated with the decision to divert it for this purpose, rather than allowing it to be sold at the market price for urban or agricultural use. (WSJ)

...and he argues that farmers, who might have to pay more for water on a more-open market, should get extra money to help them transition to the free market.

• Cato loves Lazear's arguments, and offers one amendment. Chris Edwards wants the federal government to get out of the water business, and in California, to hand over the Central Valley Project to the state. (Cato)
• In other business news, it's going to be a mixed bag for boat businesses at California recreation areas this summer. They're nervous in Tahoe, but overall expect to benefit from Folsom Lake's bad year. (TradeOnly Today)
• CNN gets into the Firehawk, which is a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter with a giant water tank on it. L.A. County owns a few. They're going to be busy this summer, thanks to the drought. (CNN)
• And finally, in a move that reminds me of the time I wanted to name this blog "Hot, Wet, Climate Action," the San Francisco Public Utility Commission has a new, sexy (or is it sexxy?) campaign to conserve water, with words like "QUICKIE" and "DOING IT" popping out of copy alongside minimalist pictures of pieces of water plumbing. My favorite is "DIRTY HANDS" with its faucet shot to look like a piece of anatomy. (SFPUC)

VIDEO: Get paid for doing it nice!

How has your community been affected by the drought (besides getting more suggestive ads about jiggling the toilet handle)? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Less water in Hoover Dam means less power coming from the Dam's generating units. ; Credit: Dawn Danby/via Flickr

Monday's fat stack of news also includes some views about what to do about drought and Western water supplies.

The New York Times has published six answers to the questions "What are the best ways to share the water? And how can we ensure it lasts for the foreseeable future?" Pat Mulroy, former general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, weighs in, as do several other think tankers:

[N]ew energy and fuel production options have become more water intensive. Unconventional oil and gas production methods such as hydraulic fracturing have significant implications for local and regional water quality and quantity. Bioenergy consumes water at various stages of production (including irrigation for crops) and also has impacts on water quality and quantity...We should be pursuing cleaner energy and streamlined approaches to conserving water in order to truly safeguard our water supply. (Newsha Ajami/Stanford University)

An incredible 40 percent of the water consumed by Americans goes into meat and dairy production. Livestock must drink water and there is some water use at the farm, but most of this water is for the producing animal feed...Is this a wise allocation of the limited supply of freshwater in America? (Arjen Hoekstra/University of Twente, Netherlands)

• Closer to home, the Sacramento Bee has an ongoing series about drought solutions. Mariposa County resident Tom DeVries, who lives in forestland at 4,000 feet, offers his take:

Trees take water; a big one can draw 100 gallons a day out of the ground. All that junk forest in California is sucking up water that should be filling my spring and well and flowing downhill toward the rest of you. (Sac Bee)

• You know who else has good ideas about how to conserve water in drought? Australians. (KQED)
• Jay Lund from UC Davis modeled a "mega-drought" with his team and found that the economic consequences of a big drought event could be mostly managed through smarter water conservation policies. (California Water Blog)
• Falling water levels at Lake Mead are lowering Hoover Dam's energy production. Generating units have recently been "derated," meaning that they're expected to have a lower capacity for producing electricity now that there's less water to turn turbines. (EE News)
• Jason Dearen and Garance Burke report on "senior rights holders," and how poorly California accounts for water use by people who have rights dating back before 1914 at anytime, and how much that matters now during the drought. (AP)
• You're gonna see a lot of these stories all week: it's a terrible year for setting off fireworks. I bet rural fire chiefs have their teeth on edge already. (Merced Sun-Star)
• And we'll finish up in Southern California. In the first of a duo of Dana Bartholomew stories, the Daily News reports on Turf Terminators, a company that offers to leverage the recently-raised turf removal incentive and swap out homeowners' lawns for less thirsty landscapes...essentially for free, since the company's premise is that it can do the work for the price of the rebate. (Daily News)
• In the second, Bartholomew profiles a Studio City water-conservation demonstration at homes along Rhodes Avenue. (Daily News)
• And a UCLA project examining water use and conservation potential in territory served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power suggests that we're not pricing water well enough to encourage conservation. Authors of a policy brief with the California Center for Sustainable Communities say dual metering, for inside and outside, would also improve conservation. (Imperial Valley News)

How has your community been affected by the drought? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

California cherries. ; Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/ babi_santander

Food for thought:

• As food production in the California Salad Bowl withers, growers in Oregon are seeing more business come their way. Many are jumping at the chance:

That means there is a great opportunity to supply a need to grocery markets. “Growers can take advantage of the crops that can be grown here that they won’t grow there,” Penhallegon said. “This would be the year to increase production. (Farmers) just need to find out what is lacking. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers; there is an open door there.” (Corvallis Gazette-Times)

• Are you enjoying cherry season? Have you noticed how expensive they are? That may be because the harvest is down 75 percent this year. It's because of warm days in the winter. (Capital Public Radio)

Water fight:

• The Wall Street Journal looks at the fines and citations that more California cities are using to get people to save water. Sacramento is one of the most aggressive when it comes to policing, but it kind of has to be:

This year, the city cut outdoor watering to three days a week from two. Because only about half its homes have water meters to measure use, Sacramento must rely on inspectors to help enforce the rules. (Wall Street Journal)

• Today's other fight is over those well-drilling men. Everyone wants a piece of these guys. All these new wells and shrinking aquifers puts me in mind of "There Will Be Blood." Perhaps a effective ad campaign would feature Daniel Day-Lewis yelling, "I ... drink ... your ... MILKSHAKE!"

We're on a one-way trajectory toward depletion, toward running out of groundwater, says Jay Famiglietti, a University of California hydrologist and a leading expert on groundwater. He points out that California is the only Western state that doesn't really monitor or regulate how much groundwater is pumped.

So it's not unlike having several straws in a glass, and everyone drinking at the same time, and no one really watching the level, Famiglietti says. (NPR)

Evaporation:

• Here and Now has an interesting story (also interesting sounding - think Radiolab) on the science of stopping water loss from evaporation. Apparently, reservoirs can lose just as much water to evaporation as it does to use. (Here & Now)

How has your community been affected by the drought? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A screencap from NBCLA of the rapidly spreading, 4,300-acre vegetation fire in the Pope Valley area of Napa County, which by Thursday had destroyed two homes and prompted the mandatory evacuation of hundreds of others.; Credit: NBCLA

Today's dryku comes from H. Hanson of Pyro Spectaculars:

Because it's so dry
Professional fireworks shows
Are the way to go

Hanson actually wrote no less than five excellent drykus about the importance of professional fireworks shows during the drought. His company will be doing the fireworks at the Rose Bowl Friday night. You can get more information about that and other shows at our Fireworks FAQ. And remember to keep sending your #drykus to @kpccdryku.

Fire:

• Firefighters continue to battle a wildfire burning near Napa. Thousands of acres have burned, and more than 200 homes have been evacuated. Fire officials said the intensity is due to the bone-dry conditions. (KPCC)

Hunger:

• Tulare County and other areas hit hard by the drought have been providing food assistance to people who've lost work because of the drought. Supplies are running short, because need is more than anticipated.

Pickers aren’t the only workers hurt by the drought. Food banks are seeing some truck drivers, too. Less picking means less product to ship.

“We think [this] is going to have a devastating effect on our families,” said Wynn, adding that Visalia Emergency Aid passed out more than 500 boxes in about three weeks. “We only have 87 boxes left to last us through the rest of summer, and we serve over 800 families a month.” (Visalia Times-Delta)

Wildlife:

• The drought is driving insects from the desert into more urban areas. They're coming in search of water and nourishment. The good news is we might see more butterflies. The bad news?

Also, expect to see more roaches, black widows and ants during the summer, when they are most active, according to David Wilcox, owner of the Yucca Valley-based Sahara Pest Control that services the Coachella Valley. (The Desert Sun)

• Lakes and rivers are lower, which means less water to warm, which means warmer water, which means less oxygen in the water, which means a lot of people worried about fish. (Fresno Bee)

Wine:

• Finally, because we need some good news this morning, some wine growers/makers say that the drought is stressing their vines perfectly. That means the wine this year should be of good quality, even if there's less of it. Stock up. (CBS Sacramento)

How has your community been affected by the drought? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A 1962 Thousand Oaks survey picture of H.L. Hall Water Well and Test Hole Drilling, and Aitken and Kidder Water Development, by Pat Allen. Water well drilling goes back a century in California, but records are scarce for public viewing.

Monday's news is nosy about your neighbor — and your neighbors' groundwater drilling.

• More great reporting from the Sacramento Bee on anachronistic problems of transparency in how we manage water in California. Even some well drillers now favor more transparency for groundwater "well logs":

In all other Western states, such records are accessible to whomever wants to see them – from university professors to civil engineers, real estate agents to the media. But in California, well logs are barred from public inspection by a 63-year-old law written to keep data gathered by well-drilling companies from falling into the hands of competitors. “The lack of information about well logs makes no sense, particularly as we are trying hard to manage a diminishing public trust resource,” said Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank in San Francisco. “This is another one of those anachronistic statutes that does not belong in a modern water management system,” Mount said. (Sacramento Bee)

• Nearly 90 percent of the $700 million in "emergency drought relief" money authorized by the governor a few months ago is yet to be spent. But, as our public radio colleague Ben Adler reports, that's not necessarily as bad as it sounds. Grants take time. (Capital Public Radio)
• The secret new trend in water district conservation isn't cops, it's guys who make "water-wise house calls":

One out of every four households has a leak of some sort, usually something as simple as a loose toilet flapper, [water district spokeswoman] Figueroa said. "Leaks are common," she added. "Don't be embarrassed." (SJ Mercury News)

• The New York Times reports on how Californians are tracking their neighbors' usage deep into the drought. Ian Lovett explores Twitter-based shower-shaming (a phenomenon this blog noticed some months ago), ratting your neighbor out for violating restrictions and other guilt-based behavioral nudges. About our region, he writes:

Most homes in Southern California have already been outfitted with efficient shower heads, toilets and garden hoses, making it harder for residents to significantly reduce their water consumption than it was during the last severe drought a quarter-century ago. (NYT)

And how has your community been affected by the drought? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Kaba/Flickr

Tuesday's drought news makes you question whether waiting so long in the drive-thru line will continue to be worth it.

First, today's dryku:
Burger prices rise
Will we turn to other foods?
Burritos' do too

Food:

• Have you noticed the increased food prices at the grocery store? Well, now you're going to see it at your fast food joints too. In-N-Out and Chipotle are having to raise prices on their food. Starbucks has also.

In-N-Out raised the cost of its hamburgers and cheeseburgers by a dime and their famous Double-Double jumped 15 cents to $3.45. French fries were unchanged but soft drinks went up a nickel. (San Gabriel Valley Tribune)

Oil and Water:

• They don't mix, but they separate pretty well. The New York Times looks at how an oil field in the Central Valley also pumps 760,000 gallons of water each day that it sells to a local water district. Article goes on to look at the fight over water use in fracking. (NY Times)

Looting:

• The lowering water levels at Lake Oroville have revealed more prehistoric artifacts. Volunteers are helping rangers by keeping tabs on looters who are digging up the relics. My favorite factoid is about how meth heads are among the many culprits. Does smoking meth cause an uncontrollable digging impulse?

Though many who disturb artifacts may not know any better, others can be troublesome. Among them are insomniac "tweakers" high on methamphetamine. "They just dig and dig like little squirrels," Dobis said. (LA Times)

Witches:

• Dowsers have been the media darlings of the current drought year. Benjamin Radford pokes at the practice and points out why we should trust our suspicions about the water-finding trick. He also gives a history lesson about all the things dowsing has been used to find: water, oil, jewels, murderers... (Discovery)

Maps and charts:

• Finally, I leave you with Weather Underground's latest roundup of water statistics. This year is dry but not the worst on record. Reservoirs are still holding a decent amount of water, especially Pyramid Lake. What's up with that? I'm going to have to look into that. (Weather Underground)

And how has your community been affected by the drought? Share your story with a photo on Twitter or Instagram. Tag it #mydrought. For more details on our photo project, click here.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

While the broader markets have seen sharp declines, Frank Holmes, CEO and chief investment officer of U.S. Global Investors, homes in on gold, gold stocks and bitcoin, and gives his prognosis for the...

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Rick Bright filed a complaint this week with the Office of Special Counsel, a government agency responsible for whistleblower complaints.; Credit: /Public Health Emergency via AP

Attorneys for Rick Bright, the government scientist who said he had been reassigned and subsequently filed a whistleblower complaint, say a government watchdog agrees that he should be reinstated to his post.

Bright was serving as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is working on a vaccine to combat the coronavirus.

He said he was ousted from the position last month because he wanted to spend money on safe and vetted treatments for COVID-19 — not on ones without "scientific merit," such as hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that President Trump and others had been touting.

Trump on Wednesday called Bright "a disgruntled employee who's trying to help the Democrats win an election."

Bright's attorneys say that the Office of Special Counsel, which hears whistleblower cases, determined there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that his removal was retaliatory and therefore prohibited.

Bright's attorneys say OSC plans to contact the Department of Health and Human Services to request that it put Bright's removal on hold for 45 days so the office can complete its investigation into the allegations.

The OSC said it "cannot comment on or confirm the status of open investigations."

In a statement to NPR, Caitlin Oakley, a spokesperson for HHS, said: "This is a personnel matter that is currently under review. However, HHS strongly disagrees with the allegations and characterizations in the complaint from Dr. Bright."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Courtesy Randy Newman

Read the full article at LAist

; Credit: /Janice Chang for NPR

The high school senior sitting across from Franciene Sabens was in tears over the abrupt amputation of her social life and turmoil at home. Because of the coronavirus, there will be no prom, no traditional send-off or ceremony for the graduates of Carbondale Community High School in Carbondale, Ill. And Sabens, one of the school's counselors, could not give the girl the one thing Sabens' gut told her the teen needed most.

"I want to hug them all, but I really wanted to hug that one," Sabens remembers.

Instead of a desk between counselor and student, there were miles of Internet cable and a computer screen. No hug. No private office. This is Sabens' new normal.

"Zoom is just not gonna ever bridge that gap," she says. "That one was pretty rough."

The job of the school counselor has evolved over the years, from academic guide to something deeper: the adult in a school tasked with fostering students' social and emotional growth, a mental health first responder and a confidant for kids, especially teens, who often need a closed door and a sympathetic ear. But the closure of nearly all U.S. schools has forced counselors like Sabens to reimagine how they can do their jobs. And the stakes have never been higher.

Why students need counselors now more than ever

Between closed schools, social isolation, food scarcity and parental unemployment, the coronavirus pandemic has so destabilized kids' support systems that the result, counselors say, is genuinely traumatic.

Sarah Kirk, an elementary school counselor in Tulsa, Okla., is especially worried about her students who were already at-risk, whose families "really struggle day to day in their homes with how they're going to pay the next bill and how they're going to get food on the table. Being home for this extended period of time is definitely a trauma for them."

For so many children, Kirk says, "school is their safe place. They look forward to coming. They don't want to leave when the day is over. And to take that away from them, I do worry about the traumatic experience that will cause for many of our students."

Counselors say part of the trauma comes from students being isolated from each other.

"In a middle school, that social piece is so important," says Laura Ross, a middle school counselor in Lawrenceville, Ga. Yes, they do a lot of connecting via social media, and that's still happening, "but that face-to-face and being with their friends... they're missing that."

Students are also experiencing a kind of grief "over what they've lost," Sabens says, especially seniors. "Losing out on the end of their senior years — something that they've dreamed about their whole life... has really been overwhelming for them. So there have been a lot of tears. There have been a lot of questions... 'What did we ever do to deserve this?'"

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Instead, Sabens says, she tries to let students know "that it's OK to not be OK. I mean, most of the world is not OK right now... It's OK to grieve about what you're losing because it is tragic."

Brian Coleman, a high school counselor in Chicago, says trauma is nothing new to many of his students, but he hopes awareness of the potentially traumatic effects of school closures means "trauma-informed care is going to really, really explode in ideally healthy, meaningful ways."

That means school leaders should right now be planning for the future, asking how they can best support students when they come back to school, Ross says, "making sure that we're prepared to deal with some of those feelings that are going to increase — of anxiousness, of grief, of that disconnect that they had for so long."

Broken connections

Not only are many students grieving and struggling with new trauma, it's also harder now for school counselors to help them. That's because counselors have lost one of the most powerful tools they had before schools closed: access. Before, counselors could speak to entire classrooms about bullying and how to manage their feelings, plus they enjoyed office space where students could drop in for a quick visit or schedule a tough conversation.

"I think about my eighth graders," says Laura Ross in Lawrenceville. "My office is in their hallway. I mean, they just stop by to say hello. They stop by when they're upset, just to come in and talk and, you know, figure out their feelings."

But all of that has changed. Today, a face-to-face video meeting is the closest a counselor can get to the old ideal. Before that can happen, though, Sabens says she has to find her students.

"Email, email, email, email — lots of emails," she says, calling it her "primary mode of communication with the students."

Connecting is even more complicated for elementary school counselors whose students generally don't have cell phones or email addresses. In Tulsa, Sarah Kirk says this inability to speak directly with children is "exactly what keeps me up at night."

So far, Kirk has mostly been in contact with parents and caregivers. "That's whose [phone] number I have... But it's really up to the parent if they want to hand the phone over [to the student]." She worries that, if a child is not OK at home and needs help, she won't know.

Kirk's focus on these calls has also shifted away from academics toward "the basic needs of our kids... making sure they have enough food. We're making sure they're safe."

Evelyn Ramirez, a first-year middle school counselor in rural Redwood Valley, Calif., agrees: "Our main priority right now is just to check the welfare of each student."

Ramirez, a first-generation Mexican-American, says online learning can put additional strain on immigrant and low-income families. "I feel for the students whose parents don't know English or don't really know how to help their students."

"It's no longer private"

NPR spoke with counselors across the country, from California to Georgia, Oklahoma to Ohio, and nearly all said they worry about even the best-case scenario — when they're able to connect with a student face-to-face using video chat technology. Their fear: privacy.

At school, "we have some sort of office space... where students can feel like they're having a private conversation with counselors," says Coleman in Chicago. "Now we're asking them to be vulnerable in some capacity at home. And for so many students, home is a space where they're triggered or they don't feel comfortable sharing ... because it's no longer private."

Yes, the student's bedroom door may be closed, says Ramirez in Redwood Valley, but "at any given point, someone can walk in or, you know, mom's down in the living room. She can probably hear [our] conversation." And that might keep students from really opening up about things like basic stress or even abuse.

The same holds true for many elementary school counselors.

"We do small group counseling for kids [who] are adjusting to a variety of changes, and there's an element of confidentiality that's built into that group," says Marie Weller, an elementary school counselor in Delaware, Ohio. "So I can't do a group online. I can't use Canvas or Zoom or Google Hangouts for a group because I can't get the confidentiality. So [I'm] trying to figure out, how can I check in?"

Getting creative

In Lawrenceville, Laura Ross admits: These have been trying times. But there's also a surprising upside, she says. The distance from students has forced her to get creative about how she uses technology to build a bridge back to them.

Before the outbreak, Ross helped create an after-school club for students who identify as LGBTQ+. When school closed, Ross set up a Google Classroom and asked if the club's members wanted to continue to meet virtually. "They definitely did. And the reactions were just a relief that they were still going to have the support of that club... the place that they could truly be themselves."

Ross says they even meet at the same time each week, just on Zoom.

On her last day in the office, before Ohio closed its schools, Marie Weller remembers starting to leave — then hesitating beside the childlike puppets she sometimes uses in her classroom counseling presentations. "Huh," she thought. "Maybe I'll be able to use these."

Weller and her fellow elementary school counselors say one important part of their job is making sure all students have the social-emotional skills and coping strategies they'll need to navigate a complex world. How can they do that now, from home?

Weller improvised.

She set up a smartphone camera in her house, surrounded by those puppets — a kind of surrogate classroom audience — and set about recording mini counseling lessons from her kitchen. Instead of the chime she normally uses to begin a lesson, she rings a mixing bowl with a red spatula. To teach kids about how and why they should filter what they say, leaving hurtful thoughts unspoken, she opens the coffee maker to show them how a real, paper filter works.

Weller does her own editing and even got permission from folk music favorites The Irish Rovers to use their song "What's Cooking In The Kitchen" as her opening theme. The resulting videos are brief, rich and charming, with lines like, "Your brain's amygdala acts like a guard dog."

And in Tulsa, Sarah Kirk is doing something similar, posting videos where she's sitting on the floor of her house, surrounded by colorful pennants and stuffed animals. Her dog, Crew, a cuddly 80-pound sheepadoodle (nearly as big as Kirk), even makes a camera-blocking cameo.

In her first episode, Kirk read a story meant to reassure children she can no longer hug. It's about how we all have an invisible string that connects us, even when we're far apart.

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Patt Morrison's outfit for March 26, 2013. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

For good or ill, I have six-months’ worth of winterish wardrobe in a part of the world with six weeks’ worth of winter. Indoors and AC are great equalizers, yet I am rushing to get in the wools and tweeds before we start sweating – probably in April. [President Richard Nixon loved to have a fire in the fireplace of the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House, so much so that he cranked up the AC so he could enjoy a cozy fire even in August.]

So I had to give a season’s last hurrah to this Jacquard brocade coat with coppery embroidery and brown velvet piping, worn over your plain ol’ brand X brown jersey dress.

Rose-gold is such a flattering shade, hence the bracelets. [The lampshades at the Belle Epoque Paris restaurant Maxim’s were made of soft pink silk because it made ladies’ complexions look so much better.] 

Brown and orange doesn’t sound like a very tasty combination, but they do work, I think, in the subdued brown tartan shoes with rhinestone buckles the color of sunset. They put me in mind of the more prim Pilgrim buckles on Roger Vivier shoes like the ones Catherine Deneuve made famous in "Belle de Jour," a movie all about a young woman who was rather the opposite of prim behind closed doors.

The crosshairs tartan pattern in the center of the buckles make me think of a submarine periscope, which makes me think of the Lusitania — sunk 98 years ago this May 1 — which served to help nudge the United States into World War I. Now that I think of it, the brown felt and velvet hat is rather World War I-ish, too.

Hi, sailor!

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Audrey Hepburn I am not, but every once in a while, a girl’s gotta go for the gamine look, right? The ankle-length or capri trousers, the ‘50s pink and black color scheme. This is not the ‘’Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Audrey Hepburn, but the 1957 “Funny Face” Audrey, the intellectual beatnik girl who agrees to do a photo modeling shoot for Fred Astaire in exchange for a trip to Paris, where she can to worship at the feet of her “empathicalism” guru, Professor Flostre, who turns out to be just another “mec” on the make.
 
Of course I had to sneak in some commentary in this ensemble: the shirt in sweetheart-pink with stylized black silhouettes of classic runway shapes over the years …  and the shoes, with the pink-and-black face of a sassy manga girl. This one I like. Some of the sex-bomb manga girl illustrations look more like teen boy fantasy porn versions of those classic Keane portraits of solemn-faced, big-eyed children.
 
If you think Meryl Streep was a tough cookie in “The Devil Wears Prada,” check out the original: Kay Thompson and her star turn as the glamorous, tyrannical fashion mag editor in “Funny Face”! [Why do the handbags carried by women in the movies always look empty? Par for the fantasy, I suppose.

The only woman who comes close to achieving the empty handbag is the Queen, who, if rumor is believed, carries only a handkerchief and lipstick and eyeglasses in hers, maybe one or two other items, and on Sunday some money for the church collection plate. I’m convinced she keeps it handy mostly as a prop. Poor lady: it’s always a sedate British-made Launer handbag and she orders four new ones a year. Maybe at least in her imagination she goes online and buys a Stephen Sprouse Louis Vuitton neon graffiti bag, just for the heck of it.]
 
The Harry Potter cast did a little bit about the Queen’s handbag for her 80th birthday:

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Patt's Hats for Monday, April 8.; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

The twinset, in russet and camel colors, was my ‘homage’ to Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, who died Monday at the Ritz Hotel in London.
 
If you're unfamiliar with a twinset, it's the classic matching sweater-duo ensemble, sleeveless or short-sleeved sweater under a cardigan, a style much favored in the U.S. by June Cleaver and sorority girls in the 1950s, like the classic insufferable rich sorority girl parody from “Auntie Mame":

And in Britain by a lady of a certain age and certain class. It is usually worn with pearls, ideally three strands. Odd numbers of strands are considered more chic than even numbers. It’s probably what she wore “off duty” as prime minister.

One can’t see her [see, I’m channeling her already!] lounging about Number 10 Downing Street in velour sweats, but on duty and on display in her prime ministerial position, though, she almost always wore a kind of uniform, a brightly colored suit, ladylike but not alluring, and not unlike what the Queen wears. [In the same spirit, the Queen wears twinsets when she’s off-duty and having fun, which is to say at some horsy event or another.] 

Because Thatcher was Britain’s first woman prime minister, Britons enjoyed handicapping the relationship between their head of state [the Queen] and the head of government [the prime minister]. Theirs was not the affectionate relationship of, for example, the Queen and Winston Churchill. And the best sartorial story about the relationship is the story – which has entered into myth if not into the annals of fact – that Mrs. Thatcher’s office once called Buckingham Palace in advance of a joint appearance to find out what the Queen would be wearing so Mrs. Thatcher wouldn’t commit lese majeste and wear the same color.

The Queen, Mrs. T’s office was informed, doesn’t take any notice of what other people are wearing.
 
I wrote about Mrs. T when she came here in 1991 to celebrate the 80th birthday of her “political soulmate,” former president Ronald Reagan. She visited the Reagan library, under construction, and the JPL, among other spots. You can read that account here.
 
And here’s my obituary of the former PM.
 
I last saw her in 2002, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the celebration of the Queen’s golden jubilee. I actually heard her before I saw her – that unmistakably clear voice whose pitch she worked hard to shape into the pitch and tone that became part of her political toolkit. Her funeral, next Wednesday, will be at St. Paul’s. 

Now back to my outfit! The skirt is a vintage Sonia Rykiel, which is worth the constant battle with moths to keep it in repair. I like vintage for myriad reasons: no one else is wearing what you’re wearing … the fabrics are usually of much better quality and more interesting than present-day ones … and unlike current store-bought things, vintage has the merit of being environmentally friendly.
 
I was tickled to see my viewpoint endorsed by the accomplished Vanessa Paradis, the charming and glamorous French singer and actress, Chanel model, Lagerfeld muse, and the new face of H&M’s new environmentally conscious line. Here she talks about embracing those virtues herself. Merci, Vanessa!
 
Oh, I spared the oysters and didn’t wear pearls with my twinset. Rose gold is the choice du jour.  Real? I wish!

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Patt's outfit for April 12, 2013.; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

You don’t believe it looking out your windows in Southern California today, but spring it is. Perhaps I am forcing the spring by wearing bouquets on my stems – I think I can identify ranunculus, poppies, dianthus, and maybe roses?

I don’t know how authentically botanical fabric print designers think they ought to be, but I have an unshakable childhood recall of a bedroom in my great-grandmother’s house wallpapers in blue roses, and I was for years thereafter convinced that I could grow myself some blue roses.

And is there a happier color than this jacket’s coral/peach, or a springier fabric than the cotton-blend pique? It’s not as strenuous a shade as it would be in its brightness equivalent elsewhere on the color wheel, like electric blue or acid green. [And if it were, well, I’d wear it anyway!]

But the cloche hat – Daisy Buchanan, eat your platinum heart out. The ruched ombre silk ribbon on the crown and the minute bits of bent and curled ostrich feathers, like hatchlings on the hat! [I like saying that even more than I like writing it: "ruched ombre." It sounds like a fantastical concoction of molecular gastronomy: "the rambutan brûlée this evening is topped with ruched ombre."?     

Any bets on whether the May release of "The Great Gatsby" will revive 1920s chic? Who’s ready for dropped waistlines, lower heels and  long sautoir necklaces?

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Patt's Hats for April 17, 2013.; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Is it, by chance, Helena Bonham Carter’s birthday? This begged me to take it out of the closet this morning, a frock very much a la Bonham Carter mode. [We all do know that her husband, Tim Burton, is from Burbank, right?]
 
The dress is from Stefanel – anyone know of Stefanel? An Italian company that’s done especially knockout knits. I don’t know that it has any shops here in the U.S. but I hazarded into Stefanel in Europe and liked the attitude, as well as the silhouettes, and this one in particular.
 
The sweater-ribbed knit band at the bottom puts an edge on the frou-frou of the skirt, as do the big hardware snaps on the bodice.  [That word, froufrou, or frou-frou, meaning fussy or embellished, or covered with "furbelows." "Furbelows"  is one of my favorite fashion words.
 
"Froufrou" dates to France in about 1870, when women’s clothes were exactly that. Sarah Bernhardt, one of my style icons, starred in a play entitled “Frou-Frou.”   

Of course Bernhardt gets to die ravishingly and at length in the play – she had more ways of expiring than James Bond’s villains ever dreamed up – and even though she only performed in French, American audiences ate it up when she toured here. Bernhardt said she could always recoup her fortunes in the United States, and “Frou Frou” helped her to do just that.
 
This dress, with the taffeta bubble skirt, reminded me of the style worn by Tom Wolfe’s New York society matrons in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” It’s the magnificently seminal social novel about race and wealth in 1980s New York. Wolfe he called the women “social X-rays” for the bony gauntness they cultivated. If you have not read it, you really must. It lays the groundwork for the lifestyles of the Wall Street rich and notorious of today, and is one of my favorite novels.
 
The Lucite heel on the ankle boots – "Perspex," as the British call it – gives the effect of floating, ballerina-like, across the floor – an effect I will never achieve in real life, so must rely on footwear to give me a semblance of it.

I coveted the Lucite-wedge shoes that Maison Margiela sold briefly at H&M, but didn’t have the stamina to wake up at dawn and line up at 6 a.m. back when they went on sale, so these shoes gave me a bit of the same look, along with a full night’s sleep.

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; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

This is my Earth Day homage, with the green cotton poplin coat and the nifty closures. Couture and hardware experts! Can I beseech you to tell us what this type of closure is called? The round metal gizmo is a grommet, but what do you call the short bar at the end of a chain that goes through the grommet to secure it?

I hope there’s some fanciful medieval word for it, because in my fevered romantic brain, it has the feel of the kind of clothing closure that might have been used for a coat of mail or doublet or surcoat or cotehardie or any of a number of divinely archaic phrases for wardrobe items.
 
Can a print still be spring-y when it’s on a black background, like this one? I’ve heard that there’s a new vogue for prints in tshirts. I would welcome that, because I’m weary of the myriad dreary fan-girl T-shirts, and the clever or hip ones meant to show that you are unique, along with the other two-million people wearing the identical shirt. I’ve seen enough devil’s horns and skulls and snakes to fill the Book of Revelations, so let’s just move along, shall we?
 
These shoes I wear, but rarely. Otherwise they doze quietly in their red flannel shoe bag: my green patent-leather Louboutins. I’d coveted them since seeing them new in a shop in London, when they cost about as much as my plane ticket. I lay in wait for years for someone to put them up on eBay.

The name of the style is “Iowa.” Did the person in charge of naming styles for M. Louboutin know that Iowa is a flat agricultural state smack dab in the middle of the United States? Or perhaps he or she simply liked the esthetics of a word with three vowels and a consonant. What leads me to suspect the latter is the fact that Paris has a wanna-be TexMex cafe named “Indiana.”

When I went there, it was chockablock with images of Indians, who have nothing to do with TexMex food and are not much associated these days with the state of Indiana.
 
For the life of me, I can’t remember where I got the bracelet, but the blue-green-colored “art glass” cabochons practically glow, like that magnificent iridescence that you find in nature. It goes by the fine name ‘’goniochromism,’’ which you should really start throwing around more in general conversation. It’s the purview of butterfly wings and peacock feathers and  scarabs and abalone shells, of course, and of that changeable taffets which seems to have a recrudescence every few years on the racks of prom gowns, and probably should not.

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; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

From brights the other day to mutes today. You could call this color palette "blush and sand," which sounds like the title of a romance novel with a Valentino lookalike on the cover!

This is exactly the kind of sweater I used to tease my grandmother about wearing, the elaborately beaded 1950s cardigans that you saw on everyone from Babe Paley to Lucille Ball to … your grandmother. 

Of course, now I wish I had more of them! The best are the silk-lined cashmere or merino wool ones made in what was, for more than 150 years, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. The work of Hong Kong tailors is legendary, and now all the 1950s and early 1960s pieces are enjoying a tremendous vogue.

In this case the colors – bronze, blush and sand – are hushed, which lets the beading look more pronounced. The sleeveless top is a silk jersey criss-crossed with stitched bands of darker silk chiffon. King’s X? And then the skirt is bias-cut chiffon in very quiet hues. If designers gave quirky names to prints the way cosmetics makers do to lipstick and cheek color, we could call this one, "Shhh! This is a library!’"

So I’m glad that the shoes get paroled to holler. The nude patent color is ladylike, not loud, which is why I’m surprised but gratified that it’s hung around for a couple of seasons now. It’s a very versatile hue, even if it’s not making it as Pantone's color of the year.

No, the troublemaker part of this ensemble is the jeweled heels. Paul Simon sang of diamonds on the soles of one’s shoes; these are big dazzling rhinestones on the heels of mine. They gleam, they coruscate, they twinkle, they flash – amid all these well-behaved quiet colors, they send out a wink and a message that "I’m really a lively girl at heart, and at my feet."

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Patt Morrison's outfit for May 20. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Here’s another version of those capris – these are a lace print from H&M – and while I’ve seen women wearing them with high heels, it just doesn’t seem right somehow. It so sullies the legacies of Mary Tyler Moore and Audrey Hepburn to pair them with anything but flats!

This is my version of a cutaway coat. In a coat like this I could attend Royal Ascot, or invent the telegraph. Obviously it’s a girl version, but I feel empowered, even … princely. At least Fred Astaire-ish. Maybe a pair of spats would make me feel more so. And I could waltz facing forward, not dancing backward, a la Ginger.

As for the adornments, I am not a hearts-and-butterflies kind of girl, but I do like to wear themed brooches in clusters or multiples, and this pair of hearts – just like a poker hand – seemed to work. One is the arrow-pierced one [not to be confused with the Pierce-Arrow, one of the handsomest motorcars ever made].

And the other, the enormous bogus diamond heart, I got from Butler & Wilson, the imaginative London costume jewelry [or better yet ‘jewellery’] designer. It’s my homage to a recent auction of what may be the largest perfect diamond in the world, 101.73 carats.

Harry Winston, the legendary jeweler, bought it for nearly $24 million and has chosen to call it, I am sorry to say, the “Harry Legacy,” which is not the kind of name a diamond like this deserves, one redolent of romance and myth, like “the Hope Diamond” or “the Koh-I-Noor Diamond.”

If you have any suggestions about what to name this magnificent perfect diamond, I’d love to hear them.

My own faux diamond’s name, I have decided, is “The Rhinestone Corazon.” How do you like it?

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Patt Morrison's outfit from her June 5, 2013 Patt's Hats entry. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

There are so many things  I like about this dress – the sleeve length, the boat neck, the fact that it’s navy and not black, and the fact that it wasn’t made in Bangladesh – but mostly it’s the gaily asymmetrical floral design that caught my eye.

The pattern is front and back, and I’m a stickler about those things. It looks like I have been loaded down with festive leis, but also loaded with one too many Mai Tais, so the flower garlands are askew as if I were listing a little bit.

There’s more of my current yellow shoe madness with these very Michelle Obama kitten-heel slingbacks in two different tones of yellow, one a more acid shade and the other more canary, or perhaps chrome yellow. That’s not to be confused with “Crome Yellow,” a very sardonic Aldous Huxley novel parodying the artsy intelligentsia set of 1920s England.

I hope you can see this bracelet. It’s a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry. The Victorians went way, way over the top on this stuff; some of it borders on the ghoulish, with lockets containing elaborately braided locks or even portraits or scenes made entirely from the hair of the deceased. I can admire the artistry but the sentiment can seem excessive. This piece, though, has a black and white enamel border around a tiny fly. Why a fly, I wondered. Then I read the inscription inside:

“From JR to AHR [clearly a husband to a wife] in loving memory of our darling little May Queen, died 7th August 1880, age 14 Mos.”

That inscription made the fly make sense. It’s a mayfly, a creature that lives a few days, or even just a few minutes, and here was this little girl, born in May – hence the May Queen reference to the mythical springtime queen of antiquity -- and died barely a year thereafter. So sweet, so sad, so human, all from an inscription on a bracelet. The girl’s parents are long dead, and so too are any siblings she may have had, but it can touch us more than 130 years later.

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Patt Morrison models a headdress from the movie "The Lone Ranger."; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Trust me – you’re going to be seeing a lot of these between now and Halloween.

I went to “The Lone Ranger” premiere last month, and outside the theater, Disneyland began selling a version of the Tonto headdress dreamed up by Johnny Depp and his folks for his role in the film, which I found to be a rollicking, ironic version of the classic action adventure with some very sober scenes evoking Native Americans’ tragic history.

The inspiration, Depp says, was artist Kirby Sattler’s interpretive 2006 painting “I Am Crow.”

Depp himself has claimed Native American ancestry, and the bird atop his bean plays a substantial if silent role in the proceedings. It is an interpretive painting, as I said, not a literal rendering of any tribal makeup. In the Sattler painting, the bird is flying above the figure’s head, not perched on it.

But the movie’s invested in storytelling, not the fine points of accuracy. If it had been, it wouldn’t have made the historical solecisms of relocating both Monument Valley and the transcontinental railroad to … Texas.

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Patt Morrison's ensemble for Aug 8, 2013.; Credit: Dave Coelho/KPCC

What shall we call this color scheme? How about ‘Manhattan Mermaid’?

The petrel blues, the turquoises, the aquas – and then that uptown/downtown black, in this case a black linen duster over a Peter Max-style splashy-print silk dress. The way the hem pools at the sides a bit reminds me of the cut of Pre-Raphaelite ladies’ tunics; I’d love to dress “period” for a week to see whether I’d like it.

Imagine, a week of hoop skirts … a week of 1950s tailleurs … a week of bustles … a week of hobble skirts … a week of liberated Pre-Raphaelite velvet gowns!

The hat is so unmistakably summer in fabric and color that it doesn’t get out of the hatbox as much as it should, poor thing. And the shoes – I did not get them together, honest, but even though the prints don’t match, it’s the dissonance that makes them work better together than if they had.

The fabric is a very textured canvas and printed like batik. [They are not the soul of comfort – oh what a dreadful pun, but is there any other kind of pun? – but they look smart hooked over the railing of a chair in a chic bistro, which is where I intend to take them!]

And the bracelets, one from a great-aunt who had a fine eye for jewelry – the turquoise is almost Persian, it’s so green, but it’s more likely to be American. The cuff is definitely Southwest, with the rope-pattern trim and the irregularly shaped bezels, although the turquoises themselves are symmetrical.

Because I’m left-handed, my right arm bears the singular honor of being “ornamental,” and bearing the burden of the bling.

Summer on, ladies!

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; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Someone just told me that pink and gray were Vassar’s colors. I would say, “Go Vassarettes!” but, one, Vassarette is a line of brassieres, and, two, the Vassar mascot is The Brewer, for the profession of its founder, Matthew Vassar. You go, Seven Sisters girls and guys!

The scarf is one of two I picked up on vacation – for some reason insect themes are big just now. This one has little gray ants marching over a pink field, a reminder of – what? Teamwork? Conformity? Time to call the exterminator? The other scarf, which I’ll wear presently, is the color of a ripe nectarine, with a pattern of vividly colored beetles. Scarabus chic. Dashing, no?

The glittery pink shirt is one more example of that contrast that I like, against the matte gray knit of the sweater (indoor-outdoor wear for L.A. summers, going from AC to Fahrenheit in a flash). Which explains the vast and shady hat – like a veranda on my head!

I was surprised at myself for buying these shoes – silver and bright pink; when would I ever be wearing that? But there they are, slingbacks made by “Emma Hope’s shoes, Regalia for feet,” an irresistible name.

The oval seal with the maker’s name reminded me of the oval seal on shoes made by Rayne, the 19th-century London shoemaker that had shod the women of the royal family for decades (but not the last two generations of those chic ladies: Diana, Princess of Wales, and Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge).

Please don’t blame Rayne for the Queen’s inordinate fondness for platform peeptoe shoes – her mother made her do it. Literally. Those royal ladies – the Queen, her late mother and late sister, Margaret – were quite short, and those shoes boosted their height. But still …

Here is Rayne’s website for a look at some of the glamorous and glorious shoes for feet past and present – including Anna Pavlova’s, prima ballerina assoluta. Mary Quant designed for Rayne. And before you look, that old caution:  If you have to ask how much …  

A pair of Rayne shoes is on my fantasy list for thrift-store finds, along with a Fortuny dress and a wild Schiaparelli hat. I believe, I believe...

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