Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

About Melinda Burns

Former Miller-McCune staff writer Melinda Burns was previously a senior writer for the Santa Barbara News-Press, covering immigration, urban planning, science, and the environment.

How Gallium Nitride Could Help Power the World

May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
gallium-nitride

Umesh Mishra thinks day in and day out about power conversion—the trillions of adjustments in voltage, frequency, and current made daily to deliver electricity from wall outlets to computers, TVs, virtually any electronic device. And he thinks about the gadgets that do the converting, mostly built using silicon. Collectively, those converters waste nearly as much power in the form of heat as all the energy produced by all the renewable sources in the United States. On average, silicon-based converters are only 90 percent energy-efficient. The 10 percent that is lost dissipates as heat ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2013
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California Farms Get Testy Over Water Quality

March 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The world’s most pervasive groundwater pollution problem – nitrate in drinking water – is under scrutiny in the richest farming region of the United States. This week, a report for the California Legislature revealed that 250,000 people living in Central California, including four of the top five agricultural counties in the U.S., are currently at risk for nitrate contamination in their drinking water. Many of them are among the poorest Californians. Nitrate, in this instance, is a byproduct of nitrogen fertilizer. In drinking water, high concentrations of it can interfere with the ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Urban Renewal’s Record Shows It Wasn’t All Bad

January 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Tossed into the dustbin of history more than a generation ago, the concept of urban renewal, long derided as “Negro removal,” is getting a second look. The program began in 1950 and was scrapped in 1974, by then thoroughly discredited as unfair and unworkable. In the national war on blight, the poor were disproportionately targeted for eviction from dilapidated downtowns to make way for parks, office buildings, sports arenas, and high-rise apartments. But a new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that urban renewal, or slum clearance, had some lasting positive ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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No Debate: Kids Can Learn By Arguing

January 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Let’s not “agree to disagree,” says Deanna Kuhn. The Columbia University professor of psychology and education wants to bring back serious debate in America — in sixth grade, if not sooner. Kuhn is tired of hearing that people have a right to their own opinion. It’s too easy to fall into thinking that all opinions are equal, she says, and “so why bother?” The country needs citizens who can make logical arguments “based on substantive claims, sound reasoning, and relevant evidence,” she writes. That’s language from the new educational standards for middle school, adopted ... Read More

More like this: Education, January-February 2012
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How Foreclosures Feasted on Some Cities, Not Others

January 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Here’s a tale of two cities in Southern California, one that survived the worst of the foreclosure crisis with a few scratches, and one that was badly beaten up. In 2000, Santa Paula, a historic oil town bounded by vast greenbelts of orange, lemon, and avocado groves, had a population of 29,000 and a median household income of $42,000. When the subprime mortgage industry collapsed eight years later, 16 of every 1,000 homes in the “Citrus Capital of the World” went into foreclosure, well below the national average of 22 for every 1,000 homes. Another old town, Lake Elsinore, closely ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, January-February 2012
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Why Mexican Immigrants Can’t Get Ahead

December 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

An annual Christmas pilgrimage used to see perhaps millions of Mexican immigrants, documented or not, return to Mexico from the U.S. for the holidays. But that flow has slowed as the U.S. militarizes its southern border and violence back home reduces the motherland's charms. But the economic charms of working in the U.S. are paling, too. Among the so-called 99 percent of people in the United States who have not shared in the rising prosperity of recent decades, Mexican immigrants have fared worse than most. While the real wages of other groups have remained fairly stagnant since 1970, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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The iPod Touch as a Crop Saver

November 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

On the heels of Cellscope, a device that clips onto a smartphone to analyze blood samples, comes Gene-Z, a device that can clip onto an iPod Touch and identify diseases in crops and plants. The traditional approach to identifying plant pathogens is to collect field samples, send them to a laboratory, and await the results. With Gene-Z, researchers said, they can take a swab of plant pathogens, transfer the sample to a kind of “lab-on-a-chip,” insert the chip into the device, and get results within 10 to 30 minutes via smartphone technology. Gene-Z was unveiled November 7 at a conference ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Science
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The Science Behind TGIF

November 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As Charlie Brown has said for decades, happiness is a warm puppy. Researchers, however, say it’s really spending 1.7 hours more with family and friends. With help from Gallup, John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia, has discovered what seems, well, obvious: Americans are significantly happier on weekends and public holidays than during the workweek. In a recent study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Helliwell and his colleague, Shun Wang, take a careful look at people’s daily emotions. Based on data that was collected by Gallup in a random ... Read More

More like this: Culture, November-December 2011
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Poor Neighborhoods Mean Fewer High School Grads

October 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

"There's a lot of talk about how we live in a post-racial society, but that certainly isn't true," says Geoffrey Wodtke, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies the effects of growing up in the bad part of town. He and two other researchers tracked 2,100 children from age 1 to age 17, and they report that children growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment are much less likely to graduate from high school. While the results may seem expected, much of the previous research in the field had taken only snapshot measurements of such "neighborhood ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Jimmy Carter Wants to Finish Off Guinea Worm

October 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Former President Jimmy Carter joined the World Health Organization in London today to ask governments and nongovernmental organizations for $93 million in donations over four years to rid the world of guinea worm disease, a debilitating infection that still afflicts four African countries. In 1980, about 3.5 million people in 20 countries suffered from guinea worm disease, an affliction so painful that it can immobilize sufferers for months. According to the World Health Organization, only 970 cases of guinea worm have been confirmed from January through August this year, primarily in the ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Health
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