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| Many people of all ages go camping at Warren Dunes State Park on the shores of Lake Michigan to get some much-needed physical activity — which can even benefit those who don’t begin exercising until age 70 to 84.
For two metro Detroit residents, however, their April camping trip to Warren Dunes took a bizarre and seemingly supernatural turn. According to the Detroit Free Press, Joshua Super and his girlfriend, Shalee Blackmer, of Orchard Lake Village, noticed a strange sight when they went to take a photo of the sunset over the lake. They saw a distorted collection of shapes and columns that appeared to hover over the horizon. Upon a closer look, they realized they were looking at an upside-down Chicago skyline. “I wouldn’t call myself a believer in aliens, but I truly thought it was something like that,” said Super, 22. At about 60 miles away, Chicago normally can’t be seen from the opposite side of Lake Michigan — so how can its skyscrapers appear in the sky this way? As it turns out, Super and Blackmer saw a mirage, according to Andrew T. Young, a San Diego State University astronomer and a leading expert on mirages. This particular mirage was classified as a superior mirage, which takes place when a large and well-defined area of warm air sits over a layer of colder air and distorts light rays from the atmosphere. “A thermal inversion forms over the lake, bending the line of sight from the camera to Chicago back down, and producing the inverted image, which is typical of mirages,” Young said. “Normally, Chicago is hidden by the curvature of the Earth, so that it lies below the lake horizon. One pill of the drug contains 25, 50 or 100 mg of Sildenafil. Cialis https://medimagery.com/buy-cialis-online-generic-cialis-tadalafil/ is intended for the treatment of men with erectile dysfunction, which is also called impotence. Here, the optical ray curvature is stronger than the curvature of the lake surface, and that brings the city’s buildings into view.” At this time of the year, when the Great Lakes are still cold but the air has begun to warm up, superior mirages aren’t an uncommon occurrence. It’s important to distinguish mirages from illusions, as the two terms aren’t interchangeable. In a mirage, the atmosphere acts as a lens to reflect an image. Super’s photo of the mirage has garnered almost 1.5 million views on Reddit alone since he posted it online, the Chicago Tribune reported. “I feel like I’ve known about Michigan and its different weather phenomena all my life, but I was completely blindsided by this,” he said. |
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Quirky Weather Effect Shows Upside-Down Chicago Skyline Over Lake Michigan
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Middle School Students Develop Mobile App For Ford Competition
The prominence of mobile apps in recent years has finally reached the halls of middle school. Educational publication The Journal reports that a team of middle school students from a suburb in Detroit won a mobile app design contest, and in doing so won $15,000 for their school. Students from the Patrick Henry Middle School in Woodhaven, Michigan designed a mobile app that enables parents to find out what their kids are doing at school. The team was part of a competition that included more than 100 students from five middle schools around Detroit.
Held at the Ford Resource and Engagement Center on March 27th-28th, the challenge was sponsored by the Ford STEAM Lab, an educational initiative run by the Ford Motor Company Fund.
The Patrick Henry students developed an app that enables students, parents, and teachers to access their schoolwork and lesson plans outside of school. The app also allows parents and teachers to contact each other directly. Their $15,000 prize also included a $2,500 scholarship for each of the five team members for when they enter college.
In second https://www.ncahcsp.org/buy-klonopin-online-2-mg/ place, the Clippert Academy team designed an app that improves reading comprehension through quizzes, audio clips, and e-book downloads.
The event’s organizers had nothing but praise for everyone involved. The competition taught students to “utilize existing technology [and] develop flexible schedules so they can continue learning on their own time and improve ways to communicate outside the classroom,” Ford Motor Company Fund Multicultural Community Engagement Manager Shawn Wilson said.
The five teams were all invited to attend a seven-day coding class at the Henry Ford College in Dearborn this summer. There, they will have the opportunity to build genuine Android apps.
The event was televised live on MSNBC and was judged by civil rights activist and former Obama Administration official Van Jones, Detroit Free Press editor Stephen Henderson, and MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid.
Software development and mobile apps are becoming increasingly important, if not integral, to the American economy, which is one reason why the competition was held. Nearly 81% of businesses consider their blog to be an essential component of their website and, in turn, overall marketing strategy.
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Uber Helps Detroit Residents with Spring Cleaning by Bringing Used Clothing Donations to Goodwill
This weekend, transportation app Uber and charity Goodwill teamed up to collect used clothing donations from Americans doing their spring cleaning. The mobile app helped donors in more than 50 U.S. cities on Saturday, May 2. App users could order an SUV to come to their home to pick up any bagged clothing donations, which were taken to the nearest Goodwill free of charge.
Uber is a popular service that allows users to find rides, as an alternative to a cab service. It’s generally available in major U.S. cities, where the spring cleaning initiative also took place; most notably, the clothing drive appeared in areas like Detroit, Dallas, Denver, and Miami.
Not only did Goodwill and Uber services in Detroit help the needy this Saturday, but so did Goodwill of Greater Grand Rapids and others around Michigan.
Last year, Uber and Goodwill had teamed up in New York for a spring cleaning initiative. A successful clothing drive in Boston and San Francisco last fall pushed the two groups into a partnership once again.
David Plouffe, Senior Vice President of Policy and Strategy at Uber, said that he was glad his company was teaming up with the charity. “Both Uber and Goodwill strive to make a meaningful impact on local communities, and we are thrilled to once again team up with Goodwill to make donating fast and easy for Uber users,” Plouffe said in a Goodwill press release.
In addition to accepting clothing donations, Goodwill also helps people in need get training and job placement in their communities, thanks to the charity’s donation programs.
Not only does Uber’s ride sharing program help to save on carbon emissions from vehicles, but the work done with Goodwill and other charities helps to curb pollution, too.
Used clothing donations are especially important because they help reduce the amount of clothing that gets thrown into the trash. Because Americans buy about five times as much clothing as they did in 1980, according to The Atlantic, textile trash grew by 40% between 1999 and 2009.
Americans donate around 14.3 million tons of clothing and textiles each year, all of which goes toward helping families in need all over the world.
However, more can be done, say groups like the Environmental Protection Agency, who call clothing one of the least recycled reusable materials.
Kim Zimmer, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of global development for Goodwill Industries International, hopes that the partnership between Goodwill and Uber will help more people see the value of donating clothing.
“This collaboration has made Spring cleaning and donating an easy task, while ensuring that their clothing is not only diverted from landfills, but also goes toward supporting efforts to put people back to work,” Zimmer said in the Goodwill press release.
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Rising Waters Could Either Help Detroit Neighborhoods or Create Devastation
Last summer, record rainfall descended on the Detroit metropolitan area. Highways looked more like canals, sewer systems were utterly overwhelmed, and thousands of homeowners’ basements looked more like dirty indoor pools.
“It came in like a roaring river,” said Odessa Willis, 61, a longtime resident of Detroit’s west side. “There was 3 1/2 feet of water in my basement.”
Willis’s basement, which flooded on August 11, would be free of water within a few days. But the damage this flooding left behind wouldn’t be as easy to fix.
According to the Detroit Free Press, mold spores stemming from the flood aggravated her grandson’s allergies. To her dismay, Willis’s homeowner’s insurance wouldn’t cover the $3,000 to $5,000 price tag of repairing the water damage, either.
She was able to get assistance from All Hands Volunteers, a Boston-based nonprofit that works to help victims of natural disasters like the flooding in Detroit. Willis and about 400 other Detroit residents got the repair work they needed with the help of these volunteers.
But ultimately, last summer’s floods were far from an isolated incident. Experts predict that the effects of global climate change will only continue to worsen throughout Michigan, increasing rainfall and temperatures by the end of this century.
According to Model D Media, the Union of Concerned Scientists has predicted that rainfall could increase as much as 25% during the fall and spring by 2100. This would make storms like last summer’s a regular occurrence, overwhelming the city’s stormwater sewers, flooding basements and spilling sewage into the Detroit River and Lake Erie.
Others say rising waters could actually help Detroit, however — and that all it will take are some small changes to the city’s infrastructure and stormwater management systems.
Don Carpenter, an engineering professor at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, says one solution for Detroit is the green street — a specially landscaped road lined with bioswales, a type of grasses that absorb more water and provide relief to sewer systems.
21st-century Detroit could either become a wasteland where devastating floods are commonplace, or it could become one of the leaders in green engineering and infrastructure. It’s up to its residents to decide.
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Michigan’s Water Woes Go Far Beyond Detroit
Spring is in the air, which means that the snow is melting, birds are singing, and the Detroit Water Department is gearing up to send out shut off warnings — about 800 of them, in fact.
According to CBS News Detroit, Deputy Director Darryl Latimer says that the projected number of shut offs is actually not as bad as it was at this time last year. The department didn’t send notices last year, but chose to do so this year in an effort to offer better service. The notices will be sent mid- to late-April to residential customers with delinquent accounts.
Last year, nearly half of Detroit’s residential water accounts were delinquent — about 150,000 out of 323,900. The shut offs were in such high numbers by summer 2014 that it caught the attention of the United Nations and also sparked protests in the city.
What’s alarming about 2015 is that though there are fewer slated shut offs, residents may have a harder time paying their delinquent bills. The Detroit utility board just approved tax hikes on water and sewer services last month — a 3.4% increase for water and a 16.7% increase for sewer.
Sewer systems in Detroit have seen their fair share of troubles as well — like last year’s 10 billion gallons of sewage overflow and deteriorating sewer systems in residential areas, many of which need replacing. Experts say that pipe bursting, a form of trenchless sewer line repair, can come with warranties that last up to 50 years.
Other infrastructures in Michigan that deliver water and sewer services to customers are also in trouble.
After Flint left the Detroit water system last year, the city began using a backup water system which was unfamiliar and uses a new method of filtering the water. This has resulted in the delivery of caustic, foul-smelling, undrinkable water to Flint homes. While the Flint system affects homeowners, the Detroit system is overburdened by lack of payment.
As of now, there’s no clear solution to either problem.