By Seth Borenstein

Posted February 2nd 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Snow has been missing in action for much of the U.S. the last couple months. But it’s not just snow. It’s practically the season that’s gone AWOL.

“What winter?” asked Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. For the Lower 48, January was the third-least snowy on record, according to the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University. Records for the amount of ground covered by snow go back to 1967.

Last year, more than half the nation was covered in snow as a Groundhog Day blizzard barreled across the country, killing 36 people and causing $1.8 billion in damage. This year, less than a fifth of the country outside of Alaska has snow on the ground.

Bismarck, N.D., has had one-fifth its normal snow, Boston a third. Buffalo is three feet below normal for snowfall this year. Midland, Texas, has had more snow this season than Minneapolis or Chicago.

Forget snow. For much of the country there’s not even a nip in the air. On Tuesday, the last day in January, all but a handful of states had temperatures in the 50s or higher. In the nation’s capital, where temperatures flirted with the 70s, some cherry trees are already budding — weeks early.

For the Northeast it’s one of the warmest and least snowy winters on record, with most of the region’s temperatures the last couple months averaging 5 degrees warmer than normal, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University.

“I am disgusted that golfers are golfing on my cross-country ski course,” said New Jersey state climatologist David Robinson, director of the Global Snow Lab.

Matt Dulli, an assistant golf pro at The Golf Club at Yankee Trace in the Dayton, Ohio, suburb of Centerville, said 115 rounds were played Tuesday amid balmy temperatures that reached a high of 60 degrees.

“The first thing you hear out of people’s mouths is, ‘Can you believe we’re playing golf in January?’ They’re just ecstatic that they can get out at this time of year,” Dulli said.

But there is lots of snow and dangerous cold — it’s just elsewhere in the world. Valdez, Alaska, has had 328 inches of snow this season — 10 feet above average — and the state is frigid, with Fort Yukon hitting a record 66 below zero over the weekend.

Nearly 80 people have died from a vicious cold snap in Europe, and much of Asia has been blanketed with snow. January has been the ninth snowiest since 1966 for Europe and Asia, though for the entire northern hemisphere, it’s been about average for snow this season.

The weather is so cold that some areas of the Black Sea have frozen near the Romanian coastline, and rare snowfalls have occurred on islands in the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. Ukraine alone has reported 43 fatalities, many of the victims homeless people found dead on streets. More than 720 other Ukrainians have been hospitalized with hypothermia and frostbite.

The reason is changes in Arctic winds that are redirecting snow and cold. Instead of dipping down low, the jet stream winds that normally bring cold and snow south got trapped up north. It’s called the Arctic oscillation. Think of it as a cousin to the famous El Nino.

When the Arctic oscillation is in a positive phase, the winds spin fast in the Arctic keeping the cold north. But in the past few days, the Arctic oscillation turned negative, though not in its normal way, Halpert said. The cold jet stream dipped in Europe and Asia, but is still bottled up over North America.

That’s because another weather phenomena, called the North Atlantic oscillation is playing oddball by staying positive and keeping the cold away from the rest of North America. About 90 percent of the time, the North Atlantic and Arctic oscillations are in synch, Halpert said. But not this time, so much of the United States is escaping the winter’s worst.

What’s happening isn’t just an inconvenience.

Trees and plants budding early may lose their chance to bloom when the inevitable deep freeze returns, said U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Jake Weltzin, who heads a national network that monitors the timing of spring for plants and animals. He said peach trees are budding in Georgia and in Oklahoma forsythia and daffodils have been out for two weeks now, adding “it’s happening everywhere.”

“If you think about plants and animals being kind of biologic thermometers, they are indicating a very early spring,” Weltzin said. “That’s a problem.”

This could mean less fruit available this year, Weltzin said. In New York, it could weaken the grapes used to make wine, added Cornell University horticulturalist David W. Wolfe.

But it is getting people outside more often.

In the heart of the snow belt, Holden Arboretum saw a 32 percent jump in December attendance and a 20 percent jump in January visits. Over the two months about 4,200 people visited the site in Kirtland, Ohio, outside Cleveland, that features gardens, woodlands and trails.

Along Lake Erie near Toledo, Ohio, a ferry service that carries visitors to islands was beginning winter routes Wednesday for the first time in six years.

“We’ve just had a remarkable run of unusual winters in the past six years globally,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I have to say that winter hasn’t really hit yet. Certainly not where I live.”

____

JoAnne Viviano and Doug Whiteman contributed to this report from Columbus, Ohio.

By Teresa Chin, Plain Dealer

Posted July 5th 2011

CLEVELAND: For the first time in years, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections will soon know just how many registered voters it should have.

The county is in the midst of its largest purge of voter records. And when it is over, Elections Director Jane Platten expects her department will have deleted more than 100,000 inactive voters — just over one-tenth of the region’s registered voting population.

Record purging has been a controversial topic for Cuyahoga County, which gained attention in 2007 for being one of several counties with more people registered to vote than people of voting age.

Platten, who was appointed elections board director that year, said the department historically had an “inconsistent practice” of updating registration records. As a result, there hasn’t been an accurate count of valid registered voters for years.

Voter registration cannot be canceled simply because a person doesn’t vote. Instead, the process is based on whether voters are able to receive mail at the address listed on their registration. Last week, nearly 200,000 notices were sent to the addresses of those who had not voted or signed a petition in the past two years. Any voter who doesn’t respond to the mailing and who remains inactive for the next four years will be removed from the registry.

A similar mailing was done in 2007, and the county received back only 80,000 of the 180,000 notices sent. The remaining 100,000 voters will be removed in September.

Voters can become inactive for a number of reasons, Platten said. People may move to a different county, die or simply choose to stop voting altogether. (Individuals who vote absentee are still considered active and are not at risk of losing their voter registration.)

On the other hand, new voters are regularly being added to the rolls as people move into the county and local teenagers turn 18.

“The number of voters is constantly in a state of flux, so we had to put a better tracking system in place,” Platten said. “It’s important to keep our records updated, because sending voter information costs the county a tremendous amount of time, money and resources.”

Since 2007, the Cuyahoga elections board has ramped up its efforts to update voter registration, including mailing update notices every two years to identify inactive voters.

This is not the first voter registration purge for Cuyahoga County. In 2009, it conducted a smaller effort, based on death records and comparison databases with other counties, which eliminated about 59,000 voter registrations. But the voter registration rate for the county, the number of registered voters compared to the number of people of voting age, remains suspiciously high — nearly 99 percent.

“The ideal situation would be if people contacted us when they know they’re moving out of the county and wrote a note asking to be removed from the registry,” Platten said. In the meantime, her department will continue sending mailings, checking death records and duplicate registrations with other Ohio counties and, when necessary, purging records.

Although she doesn’t know if state registration policy will change in the future, Platten says the county’s election board is ready for anything.

By Brandon

Posted January 26th 2011

A radioactive imaging agent that helps doctors detect Alzheimer’s disease took the top spot in Cleveland Clinic‘s list of the Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2011

.The compound, called AV-45, is coupled with a PET scan to allow doctors to see inside patients’ brains to detect beta-amyloid plaques, the tell-tale signature of Alzheimer’s, according to a statement from Cleveland Clinic, which will conclude its annual medical innovation summit this afternoon. Currently, diagnosing Alzheimer’s is possible only through autopsy.

The Clinic annually releases its choices for the following year’s top medical innovations, which are selected by a group of its doctors and scientists. A removable hearing and communication device that treats patients who have lost hearing in one ear came in at No. 1 last year.

Cleveland Clinic doesn’t specifically name the companies or products that appear on the list, but that’s not much of a deterrent for someone with Internet access and a little patience. A quick search of “AV-45” reveals it’s been developed by Philadelphia-based Avid Radiopharmaceuticals.

Avid’s imaging compound, also known as florbetapir, hasn’t reached the market but is in the midst of Phase 3 clinical trials, so it could be ready for U.S. sales within a year or so. Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health plays a role in the manufacturing of AV-45, (pdf) providing the raw materials needed to make the compound. Cardinal operates the largest network of radiopharmacies in the United States.

An Avid spokesman wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Cleveland Clinic said it evaluates four major criteria to make selections for the “Most Innovative” list. The technology must have significant potential for short-term clinical impact, a high probability of success, be on the market or close to being introduced, and have sufficient data to support its nomination.

Other medical innovations cited by the Clinic include a new test for diagnosing asthma, technology that allows for remote monitoring of heart-failure patients and a therapeutic cancer vaccine. Here’s the rest of this year’s Top 10, listed in descending order.

10. Capsule endoscopy for diagnosis of pediatric GI disorders: A pill-sized camera captures 50,000 high-resolution images during its painless six- to eight-hour journey through the digestive tract, proving better than X-ray at detecting small bowel ulcerations, polyps and areas of bleeding.

9. Oral disease-modifying treatment for multiple sclerosis: Before fingolimid was approved by the FDA this year, MS drugs had to be injected or infused on a regular basis. This oral medication stops T-cells from attacking the myelin sheaths that cover nerve fibers.

8. Exhaled nitric oxide (NO) breath analysis for diagnosing asthma: A new hand-held diagnostic testing device measures a patient’s level of exhaled NO, which is a biomarker for asthma. Monitoring NO levels allows doctors to more accurately tailor treatment strategies.

7. Transoral gastroplasty, or TOGA: a new experimental weight-loss option for obese patients who want to lose weight and improve their health without undergoing major surgery. This “scar-less” procedure represents a significant improvement in minimally-invasive bariatric surgery and losses approaching 40 percent of excess body weight can be expected within a year.

6. Telehealth monitoring for heart failure patients: Miniature implantable monitors to measure pulmonary artery pressure daily and at-home devices to monitor weight, heart rate and blood pressure of heart failure patients allow doctors to adjust medication quickly, improving patient outcomes and quality of life, while reducing re-hospitalizations.

5. Hepatitis C protease-inhibiting drugs: Two drugs awaiting FDA approval treat hepatitis C using protease inhibitors, which work by blocking a key enzyme that viruses need to copy themselves and proliferate. In clinical trials, cure rates for the protease inhibitors are higher than current hepatitis C treatments, with fewer side effects.

4. JUPITER study and statins for healthy individuals: The JUPITER (Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin) trial pointed out for the first time that many seemingly healthy people are at higher risk for heart disease than previously thought, suggesting that statins should be prescribed even to people with low LDL (bad cholesterol), if they have high C-reactive protein levels.

3. First therapeutic cancer vaccine approved by the FDA: While not a cure for prostate cancer, sipuleucel-T is the first cancer vaccine to receive FDA approval. Prescribed to men with advanced prostate cancer, the drug coaxes their own immune systems to attack and remove the cancer, reducing the risk of death by 24 percent compared to placebo.

2. Anti-CTLA-4 drug (ipilimumab), a targeted T-cell antibody for metastatic melanoma: The effectiveness of ipilimumab in treating melanoma confirms the role of immunotherapy as an effective treatment. In patients with advanced stage III or IV melanoma, 23 percent were still alive after two years compared to 14 percent of patients who received standard treatment.

Posted March 11th 2010

A Canadian liquidator that sells surplus industrial equipment offered the top bid for a Chrysler plant in northeast Ohio.

Maynards Industries Ltd. of Vancouver bid $45.5 million in Wednesday’s auction in New York for the Twinsburg stamping plant southeast of Cleveland.

The offer faces a review at a bankruptcy court hearing Thursday in New York.

Proceeds from the sale will help repay creditors.

About 1,000 people worked at the plant when Chrysler announced shutdown plans last year, but retirements and buyouts have trimmed the work force. The factory takes steel sheets and presses them into door panels and other parts. It is scheduled to close in June.

Posted February 8th 2010

Getting a good deal on flowers this Valentine’s Day requires that you not linger too long when you stop to smell the roses.

Valentine’s Day is the biggest holiday for fresh flower sales, accounting for 40 percent of annual revenue, according to the Society of American Florists, a trade group. Prices can easily top $60 for a bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed roses, with fancier arrangements well above $100.

But wait much beyond the start of February to order, and you can expect to pay a premium. Many florists and other companies that sell flowers use complex algorithms based on their supply and demand gauged from early orders to set pricing, says Jon Strom, the vice president of floral and lifestyle merchandising of the Price Chopper Supermarket chain based in Schenectady, N.Y., who has also worked on the wholesale and online sides of the floral industry. As the holiday approaches, they may offer sales on arrangements that haven’t sold well, and pump up prices on those popular bouquets with dwindling supply.

A cold snap in Colombia, which supplies many out-of-season roses sold commercially, may also affect pricing this year. “It didn’t damage anything, but it slowed production down,” says John Dole, a professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C. The Colombian Association of Flower Producers estimates it may have lost as much as 30 percent of the crops in affected areas near Bogota. If florists must compete for last-minute supply, consumers who procrastinate on ordering could face heftier-than-normal premiums.

Ordering early is a good start, but consider these seven strategies to get the most bloom for your buck:

Get a weekday delivery
Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday this year, and if you want the flowers to arrive during that weekend, expect to pay a premium. Delivery on Friday or earlier in the week will be far cheaper because it allows florists to spread out the work, says Jennifer Sparks, a spokeswoman for the Society of American Florists. At Proflowers, standard delivery costs $5 to $10, depending on where you live. Have your order delivered on Friday, Feb. 12, and you’ll pay an extra $5. On Saturday (Feb. 13) and Sunday (Feb. 14), you’ll pay and extra $10 or $15, respectively.

Slash stem length
“Usually, the longer the stem, the more expensive [the rose],” says Janice Cutler, the owner of North Raleigh Florist in Raleigh, N.C. Arrangements in a shorter vase or bowl let florists start out with stems of shorter lengths, and so cost less. For example, a dozen long-stemmed red roses from the shop delivered on Valentine’s Day would cost $98; slightly shorter stems, $85.

Think pink
Or any other color that isn’t red. It’s the most in-demand color, and so can command a premium, Strom says. At FTD.com, a dozen long-stemmed red roses are $80. The same quality bouquet of white or yellow roses costs $75. Lavender roses are even cheaper on the site, at $50 — but there’s a catch. Growers haven’t yet figured out how to breed those blooms for longevity, so the bouquet won’t last as long, Strom says. On the upside, that also means purple roses are more fragrant than those of other colors.

Mix blooms
It’s a hard sell for customers, but limiting the number of roses in your bouquet can cut costs significantly, Dole says. Roses are out of season and in high demand, which keeps prices high. Everything else is cheap in comparison. His picks: tulips, Oriental lilies and carnations. “They’re in season, and they’re gorgeous,” he says. At Teleflora, 10 red tulips in a ribbon-tied vase cost $42.

Check for quality
In times of high demand, not all flower sellers are created equal, says Scott Testa, an assistant professor of business administration at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa. Before you order, read both recent consumer reviews and ones from Valentine’s Day last year. If you’re buying online, be sure to check the fine print to see if the bouquet will come pre-arranged by a local florist or shipped in a box from the grower, he says. The latter can be cheaper, but it usually entails do-it-yourself arranging and may not include a vase.

Use coupon codes
There are plenty out there at sites like RetailMeNot.com and CouponShack.com, although deals start disappearing in early February. At FTD.com, code COUPONCABIN20 from CouponCabin.com gets you 20 percent off at checkout through February. Shoppers linking to Proflowers through PayPal get 20 percent off and a free glass vase through Valentine’s Day.

Order a single stem
You’ll pay just $3 to $5 for a single, long-stemmed rose, Strom says. It’s a romantic and economical gesture that leaves you plenty of room in your budget for a fancy dinner out or more long-lasting gift.

By Mandi Bierly

Posted January 24th 2010

Betty White, Frasier’s Jane Leeves, Just Shoot Me’s Wendie Malick, and One Day at Time’s Valerie Bertinelli have been cast in the TV Land comedy pilot Hot in Cleveland. The show, the network confirms to EW, follows three fortysomething best friends from L.A. who, after getting stuck in Ohio, decide to stick around because the locals find them glamorous. White, according to The Hollywood Reporter, will play “a grumpy and opinionated lady who has lived in the cottage of the trio’s Cleveland house for 50 years.”

I’m loving this, particularly the idea of watching what I’m guessing will be a sharp-tongued Malick (she does it so well, she’s got to be the Dorothy) face off against White. Are you?

by Warren Riddle

Posted January 17th 2010

The whining and gnashing of teeth that immediately greet any changes to Facebook have become a cliched social networking punchline. The site, though, is currently being hammered over very real and pertinent concerns that go far beyond mere member tempter-tantrums.

The brouhaha began early last year when Facebook implemented, and then almost immediately retracted, new Terms of Service that many believed would give the site perpetual ownership of member information (like photographs). Over the course of the last year, despite the reversal, those concerns over privacy have only escalated, and some recent revelations by an anonymous Facebook employee should only serve to intensify the cacophony of complaints.
The spike in Facebook vitriol has amplified primarily because of December changes to Facebook’s privacy guidelines. The new user settings were initially described as a method for members to completely control their profile activities. People steadily identified some glaring holes in the supposed security measures, though, including the inability to securely lock down profile pictures, fan pages, and friends lists.

According to the unnamed snitch, those aren’t the only issues, as the employee claims that everything you do is not only permanently stored and saved, but completely available to Facebook staff and associates. The site All Facebook has expectedly and deservedly retaliated to the whistleblower claims, and has dismissed the supposed revelations as common knowledge with which all Facebook members should be completely familiar.

Speaking to the Rumpus, the Facebook worker asserted that when a member makes “any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information,” that activity is stored on Facebook’s servers. In order to identify a member’s “best friends,” a feature which quietly debuted recently, the site tracks and stores (at one of four massive data centers) every possible interaction. All Facebook countered by saying this practice is “widely known,” and that “if you don’t want Facebook collecting information about you, don’t give it to them.” (Excellent customer service — MySpace would be thrilled if Facebook adhered to an official “take it or leave it” approach.)

One of the most troubling revelations in the anonymous interview is the claim that any Facebook employee could log into any member account with a single master password (which was some derivation of Chuck Norris — not so funny in this scenario). The shadowy interviewee also said that various employees (at least two of whom were terminated) were caught inappropriately using that password to gain access to accounts. But, according to some, that password issue “isn’t really that big of a deal.” That may not sound comforting, but the site says it has a zero tolerance policy for snooping and it has also created a Chief Privacy Officer position.

The comprehensive interview covers even more topics, including fascinating discussions on developments in “psychological analysis,” incredibly creepy Facebook interactions, the low-down on the huge programming nerds, and Facebook’s international future. Lastly, make sure to check out All Facebook to get both sides of the story. [From: The Rumpus and All Facebook]