MLB.com’s Richard Justice has been a sportswriter for more than 30 years. He’s kept up with the changing times and has more than 31,000 followers on Twitter. (Image courtesy of The Washington Post, http://wapo.st/xNJ2cQ)

John Wayne riding up in a hybrid.

That’s Richard Justice. An old school, hard-working, down-in-the-trenches sportswriter who is blogging, tweeting, and Google +ing all the while. He is an executive correspondent for MLB.com, a position he accepted in 2011 after a seven-year reign as lead sports columnist for The Houston Chronicle.

“He’s a throwback to guys who worked really hard to make sure they had everything covered – and they weren’t just people who were writing out of their basements,” said Kevin Sherrington, The Dallas Morning News sports columnist, and Justice’s longtime friend and former colleague.

But Justice, who has covered major league baseball for three decades and more, also has embraced the changing aspects of the digital media age. He must, he says, because “it’s the world we live in. You’re either gonna adapt or you’re gonna die.”

Justice has more than 31,000 followers on Twitter and has sent out more than 14,000 tweets, mostly a blend of links to his articles, re-tweets of stories by other journalists, illuminating statistics, and the occasional audience-specific one-liners. Since his time at The Houston Chronicle, Justice has also kept up what Sherrington calls “interminable blogs.” On most days, Justice wakes up and updates his Houston blog, SportsJustice. Then the rest of his workday began.

A native of Waxahachie, Texas, not far from Dallas, Justice received a journalism degree from the University of Texas in 1976 and has since worked at such newspapers as The Dallas Morning News, the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.

He has a strong build, a round face and a receded hairline. Sherrington notes that there is a twinkle in Justice’s eye and often an impish grin. Justice speaks with more than a hint of Texas in his voice. His Texas accent becomes most apparent when he gets worked up about a subject like steroid use.

Friends and colleagues describe him as engaging, and remark on his deft humor and endless supply of stories. Justice’s journalistic work receives a similar praise.

“He was for us, and still remains, one of the best sports journalists in the country,” said George Solomon, the since-retired sports editor of The Washington Post, for whom Justice worked for 14 years covering the Orioles, Redskins, and Wizards.

What defines Justice’s work is the quality and depth of reporting. That part is straightforward for Justice, who has a simple definition of his craft.

Says he, “What being a reporter means is just you gotta show up, you gotta hang around, and you gotta listen. And you gotta ask questions.”

What soldifies Justice’s work is his ability to garner trust from the people he covers.

“He’s the best I’ve ever seen at cultivating sources,” Solomon said.

After covering his first Redskins training camp, Justice received a call from then head coach Joe Gibbs telling him he had gained that trust. Their ensuing late-night, lengthy chats in Gibbs’ office remain among Justice’s fondest sportswriting memories.

Justice prides himself on being someone who would never sell out a source for a story, and he says his subjects know that. He also puts in extra time. Frequently he is the last journalist in a clubhouse after games, picking up extra material (insights and quotes) and further developing his relationships long after other sportswriters have gone home.

“The managers, the GMs, they’ll all know who you are,” Justice said. “So when things happen they will either help you or at least know your name and know that you know what the hell you’re talking about.”

His love of talking to everyone, from team owners to bench players, is one reason he enjoys working for the online-based MLB.com. There, the strict deadlines imposed by newspapers – which often forbid time for post-game visits to the locker room – don’t hold him back. He explains the transition from print to online sportswriting with a simple, “Well, they just made me a great offer.”

Justice is passionate about baseball – the strategy, the history, even the most basic elements of the game. As a reporter who takes joy in doing his job well, he also appreciates that in major league baseball, unlike other professional leagues, it is understood that media is part of the day-to-day process.

During Spring Training, Justice approached Detroit Tigers’ manager Jim Leland, who jump-started their conversation, saying, “Yep, what do you got? What do you need me for?” So much was unspoken in Leyland’s warm, if abrupt, welcome – above all, mutual respect.

In 2004, Justice started at The Houston Chronicle, returning from Washington to Texas to be closer to home and to the ailing older generation of his family. That meant having to leave The Washington Post, a move he says certainly wasn’t made for professional reasons. It wasn’t made for lifestyle reasons either, because he still believes there is no better place to live than the Mid-Atlantic States.

Justice, his wife, and their two daughters – both of whom swim competitively – settled in Woodlands, Texas in large part because of the area’s top club and high school swimming programs. The younger daughter, Lizzie, currently swims for the University of Houston, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Justice is still a regular in the crowd for her races, even during baseball season.

Working for the Houston Chronicle also meant a switch to writing a column, which he still does for MLB.com. Many journalists scale down their reporting efforts once they become columnists, but Justice treats a column exactly as he would a beat story. He reports each one thoroughly.

Writing a column sometimes requires Justice to write about players and coaches he believes should be traded or fired. Those columns tend to be some of his most popular, but not his favorites.

“To me it’s not as satisfying as the ones you really have to work hard on,” he says. He prefers columns that require him to interview seven or eight people to fully flesh out a complex or nuanced story.

As a boy growing up in Waxahachie, Justice was passionate about sports and hometown teams such as the Dallas Cowboys, but his biggest heroes weren’t the players. He loved the guys on the field, he says, “But the guys I really loved were the guys that covered the team.”

When Justice arrived at the University of Texas in 1972 his goal was to become a radio broadcaster. At the time radio was a glamorous and popular profession – too popular it turned out. Radio classes were always full, so the computers bumped Justice into similar types of classes, typically in advertising or journalism.

Justice took a liking to journalism, joined the student newspaper, and quickly got hooked.

“It’s really magical to see your name in [the byline], and it’s sort of addictive,” said Justice, who credits U-T for doing much to shape the sports journalist that he has become.

As his career progressed, the depth and quality of his reporting preceded him. “I certainly knew him through his work before we worked together,” said Phil Rogers, a baseball writer for The Chicago Tribune.

The Washington Post sought out Justice because Solomon was impressed by his work for The Baltimore Sun. And Justice’s reputation was well known by Houston sources before his arrival at the Chronicle.

Drayton McLane, CEO of the Houston Astros until 2011, was made aware of Justice’s work from people within Major League Baseball. According to McLane, he was told that Justice “has a really unique and straightforward writing style and you’re going to enjoy him, but you better put on your seat belt. If he doesn’t like something you’ve done, he is sure gonna say it.”

And, true to this advance warning, Justice did not back away from controversy in Houston. In a column published in 2009 about the Astros’ failure to hire their top managerial choice, Manny Acta, Justice blamed McLane.

But, such criticism aside, McLane says he and Justice remain close. “Absolutely,” McLane said. “And no one has every beaten me up as badly as he did.”

An audience members asks a question during a panel discussion at the Mobile and Internet Conference Saturday. (photo: Riva Gold/ Peninsula Press)

For those who are entering the internet business in China, Kingsoft Chief Marketing Officer Xinhua Liu says it’s crucial for businesses to try to pick up a niche. “Never try to compete with 800 pound gorillas,” he warms. “Chances are very weak you can win.”

Liu was speaking at Microsoft’s office in Sunnyvale Saturday where hundreds of developers, entrepreneurs and investors gathered for a sold-out technology conference. The conference, hosted by SVCWireless, a non-profit Silicon Valley professional organization, was designed to help bridge the gap between China and California in the mobile and internet sectors.

“We have very limited exposure to China, even though we know that market is running really hot, and there’s a lot of good opportunities,” said Robin Han, Vice President of Sponsorship at SVCWireless.

“The work that Governor Brown has been doing in opening the China office in Shanghai, representing the state of California — this is going to help in terms of streamlining a lot of the business we’re doing and building a lot of trade and investment opportunities,” said Teresa Cox, trade adviser to the Obama administration.

In 2012, Governor Brown announced his intentions to open a trade and investment office in China after nearly a decade had gone by since California’s previous foreign trade offices were closed.

Technologists from Brazil, India, China and the United States, many of whom were in town for Google’s annual I/O, attended panels and discussion sessions about emerging market opportunities.

Qiming Huang, co-chairman of SVCWireless, said the goal is to support Silicon Valley developers and entrepreneurs interested in expanding to China, and to help Chinese companies form partnerships in the Bay Area.

Wang warned that everything from design principles to user needs can be also culturally specific, so it’s important to target local market needs and test on users in that market. The Chinese version of Youtube, for instance, required a radical redesign.

The conference included speakers from Google, Innovation Works, and VMWare alongside entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and developers. Topics included Google’s latest platforms, opportunities in global gaming industry, new cloud offerings and trends in the Chinese mobile and internet markets.

Hua Wang, co-founder of Innovation Works, an early-stage high tech incubator in China, says mobile internet is growing very rapidly in China. There are already about 100 million iOS devices in the market, he says, with an additional 200 million Android devices.

Within the last year, Wang said, users went from spending an average of nine minutes per day to half an hour on applications and internet use on their smartphones.

“Mobile development is a hot area,” Huang said.”Google and Apple have made global platforms that help small developers publish internationally. Before, you needed scale to publish and market your app, or reach international customers.” Thanks to these app stores, she said, it is much easier for a team of 2-3 people to publish its products.

Mobile games in particular reflect an enormous opportunity, Wang said. He expects it to be $10 billion industry in China within the next five years. Wang also sees growth in social entertainment and networking programs, as well as service and utilities applications in China.

For mobile and internet developers alike, “the cost of going international is now much lower now for tech companies,” said Lilly Huang, partner at SVBank. At the same time, she warns, the internet business in China can be very difficult for American companies to penetrate. “Anything related to content and payment, you have an automatic disadvantage” she says. “Chinese companies are ahead.”

In terms of games, Rui Zhang, the founder of Dreaming Game, says the Chinese market is quickly growing in the Android realm.  Zhang says more and more localized and mid-core games win, collectible card games are now popular, and single player casual games have a chance to succeed.

Ultimately, Lilly Huang noted, more and more technology companies “tend to go global very early. If it’s innovation to one company, it’s innovation to the world.”

Stanford University’s second annual Frost Music and Arts Festival had a distinctly psychedelic vibe Saturday. Headliner MGMT brought the rock to Frost Amphitheater, while student artists displayed their vibrant experiential art installations around the outskirts of the venue. All of the works encouraged audience participation, whether this meant adding to a painting or taking a break in a balloon-laden geodesic dome.

The work was created by a group of 40 students enrolled in a new class in Stanford’s mechanical engineering department. The course is devoted to creating art for the festival. Projects ranged from performance art to bicycle powered spin-art to a 1970s inspired dorm room. Here’s a look through some of the festival’s most interesting installations.

It’s prom season for high schools across the country, but in Palo Alto Friday night, prom came to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. “A Journey Into Outer Space” was the theme for over 100 patients and their families at the ninth annual prom marking the end of the school year.
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Organized by hospital schoolteachers from the Palo Alto Unified School District, the yearly event is open to anyone who had been a patient at the hospital in the past year and their siblings.

A community of volunteers, teachers and families created the galactic setting, complete with a flashing, moving R2D2. Donors supporting the event included DreamWorks, HP, Tiny Prints and Home Depot.

Event organizer Kathy Ho said all of the hard work came out of a mission to give patients and friends an experience they wouldn’t have a chance to get otherwise.

“And for that one night they can just forge that they’re sick and forget that they’re in the hospital,” Ho said.

For the second year, Stanford will host an outdoor music and arts festival at Frost Amphitheater. MGMT is the headlining band, and organizers are installing several art exhibits similar to those found at Burning Man and Coachella. (Photo courtesy of Lucas Oswald)

For the second year, student organizers of Stanford University’s Frost Music and Arts Festival are channeling the spirit of events like Burning Man and Coachella. They’re creating large-scale, interactive art installations to be displayed at Saturday’s concert at Frost Amphitheater.

The second annual festival features psychedelic rock band MGMT, along with supporting acts Delorean and Kuroma.

Through grants from the Stanford Arts Institute and the Student Organizing Committee for the Arts, the arts component of the festival received four times more funding than last year, which was the first year of the event. Three students, dubbed the Frost Experience Directors, are organizing all art-related aspects of the festival. Additionally, Stanford’s mechanical engineering department now offers a class specifically for students creating work for Frost.

“This is the first time I’ve seen such an army develop around an idea,” Frost Experience Director Danny Smith said. With 40 students in the class and 180 signed up to volunteer as part of the Frost Experience team, Smith says he is impressed that busy students have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to building art for the festival.

Co-Director of the Stanford Concert Network Katie Rovelstad said she’s excited that Stanford was able to book MGMT as the festival’s headliner. A campus poll conducted last year showed the group is a favorite among students.

Frost is a nostalgic venue for many Stanford alumni and Bay Area locals, who remember Stanford’s long, albeit intermittent, history of bringing well known performers such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead to the amphitheater in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

This “Mushroom Forest” was one of the art installations at the 2012 Frost Music and Arts Festival at Stanford. (Photo courtesy of Lucas Oswald)

However, this year, the Frost Experience team aimed to make the Frost Music and Arts Festival more than just a concert held in a historic location. As events such as Burning Man and Coachella have grown in popularity, large art installations that serve as shelters, climbable structures, tactile experiences, or even canvases for festival goers have become an integral part of the atmosphere.

“SCN [Stanford Concert Network] has been doing awesome concerts forever,” Frost Experience Director Max Cougar Oswald explained, “But we’ve never done large scale interactive art projects before.”

Michael Sturtz, the professor of the Frost design class, is also excited by the novelty of the endeavor and wants to see his class become more formalized in future years. Sturtz hopes to get other faculty involved, and develop a course that spans two quarters so that students have more time and support as they create their work.

Citing the cross disciplinary elements of his class, Sturtz said he wants to turn the Frost Music and Arts Festival into a “spectacular showcase” that brings music, theater, art, design, and engineering together.

Sturtz is a pioneer in the area. In 1999, he founded The Crucible, an industrial arts school in Oakland that teaches unique art forms such as glassblowing, blacksmithing and enameling. From 1999-2009, The Crucible organized the Fire Arts Festival, an event that would eventually grow to become a three-night affair with over 20,000 attendees.

The popularity of the festival mirrored a trend throughout the United States, as art and music-based gatherings draw increasingly large crowds. Burning Man, a September festival in the Nevada desert, grew from an event that attracted around 4,000 attendees in 1995 to a full-blown festival of over 56,000 in 2012.

Frost Experience Director Max Cougar Oswald poses between two Dr. Seuss-inspired “truffula trees” at last year’s Frost Music and Arts Festival. (Photo courtesy of Lucas Oswald)

Burning Man’s rise to national prominence caused many music festival organizers to take note of the event’s characteristic large-scale art installations. Within the last decade, music festivals like Coachella and the Electric Daisy Carnival have increasingly incorporated this type of interactive art.

Sturtz says that his students are excited to contribute to this growing trend as they create work that viewers can walk through, touch or even paint. “The lean back and view audience is sort of the old model,” he said, explaining that the modern festival experience is interactive.

Artist Michael Christian, who has displayed work at Burning Man for the last 17 years, builds on this idea, noting that when he used to show work in museums, the venue only allowed for one-way communication from the artist to the viewer.

It’s no surprise, he said, that students are excited to be a part of this. “You’re not being performed to,” Christian added. “You’re actually getting to participate. And there’s an empowerment in that that’s really exciting.”

Christian also emphasized the need for constant innovation. The most cutting edge work, he says, is often found at lesser-known festivals, where there are fewer expectations and restraints. “In a smaller venue it’s great. It’s fresh, it’s raw.”

This device, the brainchild of David Kline and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, is a minilab that helps researchers determine the effects climate change has on coral reefs. (Photo courtesy of David Kline, Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

Picture a tropical paradise and you might conjure something like Heron Island, Australia. Two hours by catamaran from the town of Gladstone, Queensland, the sandy island’s 40 acres are shared by a resort, a scientific research station, and thousands of black noddies, a dusky and talkative seabird that nests in the lime-green pisonia trees each austral spring.

Just beyond the white sand beach, however, is where Heron Island’s true treasure lies—a treasure in danger of melting away. The coral reef at Heron Island lies within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Protected Area, meaning that its 900-some fish species and more than 300 coral species are safeguarded from common reef-killers like overfishing, dynamiting and sediment runoff. But in the last decade, a new adversary has entered the ring: ocean acidification.

Caused by the same carbon dioxide emissions as climate change, this coral-corroding drop in seawater pH may be just as far-reaching as its climate counterpart, and just as hard to study in a laboratory—until now. Stanford researchers have joined Australian scientists on Heron Island to try out a new way of looking at acid-addled corals. And it just might be a big step in the right direction for reef survival.

Ocean acidification expert Richard Feely, of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), calls it “global warming’s evil twin.” Feely and other scientists fear this growing acidification, which was discovered in 2003, is already dissolving the shells and skeletons of creatures like corals, oysters and starfish. As these fears play out, the loss of coral reefs could mean a big-time loss to people: according to data cited by NOAA, the economic value of coral reefs—from tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection, among other services—is nearly $30 billion per year.

With stakes this high, scientists need the right information to place their bets right—in this case, to focus conservation efforts where they will do the most good. Unfortunately, this information has been hard to come by. Ocean acidification research has been hampered by the difficulty of keeping the experiments realistic. Feely lamented at a 2011 talk at the University of Washington, “Our present understanding [of ocean acidification] is from very simplistic experiments: usually short durations, with single species, under very short incubation periods—usually two weeks, three weeks—and extreme pH changes.“

The white sand beaches of Heron Island in Australia look like paradise, but the coral reef off the shore is falling victim to climate change and rising carbon dioxide emissions. (Photo: Anna Hallingstad/ Peninsula Press)

But researchers from Stanford University, the University of Queensland, and elsewhere have invented a new technique that knocks these shortcomings out—and then some. How? By bringing the lab to the reef.

It’s called the Coral Proto Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment system, or CP-FOCE. The brainchild of project leader David Kline (then at UQ, now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, CP-FOCE is a mini lab that researchers floated out to the reef and anchored on the sandy bottom. They made three copies of the device for the Heron Island experiment, each with a meter-long, clear plastic chamber, open on the bottom so creatures residing in the sand could interact normally with whatever else was inside.

Lida Teneva, a fifth year Ph.D student at Stanford University, participated in the inaugural deployment of CP-FOCE. Teneva spoke about the device and her coral reef research at Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences annual Research Review in April.

“On shore, we created … acidic water by essentially equilibrating CO₂ gas at high concentration with seawater,” explained Teneva. The process mimicked what will happen with the actual ocean as carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere rises to levels expected by the year 2100. That water was then piped out onto the reef and into CP-FOCE’s chambers, which contained a variety of local reef organisms, like coral and algae. 

Because CP-FOCE was on the reef among the natural corals, the organisms in its chambers could be subjected to acidified water without dramatically changing the other conditions they experienced. Traditional laboratory experiments, on the other hand, typically involve yanking corals out of their natural habitat and bathing them in acidified water in tanks onshore. Light levels, biological interactions, temperature, and water currents in the onshore tanks can be different from those found on the reef. This can confound the effects of acidification and leave scientists with fewer answers than they hoped for.

Getting the water currents just right wasn’t simple, though. Even though CP-FOCE’s chambers were open to the sea at both ends, those very openings disrupted the water passing through and caused it to swirl unnaturally. The solution? The openings were each fitted with a screen of parallel tubes called a flow conditioner. The flow conditioner kept the currents flowing across the coral and algae as smooth and natural as possible, explained Stanford environmental engineer Jeffrey Koseff, who lent his fluid mechanics expertise to the design of the system.

The results from the first full 8-month-long experiment with CP-FOCE are still under evaluation, said Teneva. “It was the first time that a lab experiment has been brought out into the field like that and for that long,” she explained—far longer than the over-simplistic experiments Feely described. And so far, the results confirm any coral lover’s worst nightmare: “We basically want to compare what was happening to those corals—and they were losing weight, they were dissolving.”

But all may not be lost. The CP-FOCE study is part of a larger research program to discover how fast different coastal areas are acidifying, what effects that acidification will have, and where in the world the most heat- and acid-resistant corals live. “Some corals are just really robust and can take a lot,” said Teneva—but only if they are protected from more localized damage, like the corals at Heron Island are. Identifying these robust reefs and upping their defenses from other hazards could be the key to keeping corals in the game for a long time.

“They’ve been around since the Jurassic,” she says, “about 200 million years.” They’ll survive ocean acidification, she thinks, but likely in diminished range, health and diversity. “But there will be some strongholds,” Teneva said, “and I want to make sure those are protected.” But scientists will have to help find them all, first. And CP-FOCE looks set to be a crucial tool in that search.

Teens from an East Palo Alto youth action group wait to start the May 1 rally in Mountain View. (Photo: Eli Katz/ Peninsula Press)

Bay Area residents are taking action against federal immigration enforcement measures that separate deported parents from their children, many of whom are protected from deportation by an executive order issued last year.

As supporters of immigration reform rallied in Mountain View on May Day, the debate over immigration reform heated up in Washington. A bipartisan coalition of senators is pressing to get a bill passed that would provide a “path to citizenship” for most of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.

If the bill is passed as proposed, most immigrant families would no longer have to worry that their lives could be disrupted by separation via deportation.

The activity in Congress has energized local supporters of immigration reform.

“This is the best time to get all the people together and go for it,” said Roberto Munoz, a community activist who was one of the nearly 2,000 people who demanded humane immigration policy in a march through the Mountain View streets May 1.

Fractured families were the chief concern of the protestors at the May Day rally. Wendee Crofoot, a longtime Mountain View resident who helped organize the march, explained why she believed immunity for immigrant children fell short.

“A little girl that gets to stay is great,” Crofoot said. “But I want her mother to be a citizen, too.”

The large crowd of marchers at the Mountain View rally was in step with Crofoot’s concerns.

For over two hours on an abnormally hot afternoon, the mostly Latino demonstrators chanted, sang, drummed, and whistled their demands for family friendly immigration laws. At the front of the procession, which stretched for multiple city blocks, demonstrators held two large banners. One urged a “Comprehensive Path to Citizenship.” The other read “Families Have No Borders.”

Groups of teenagers assembled at the front of the march. One group wore blue shirts that read “Stop Deporting Youth.” A group of girls wearing white shirts were committed vocal leaders. One teen held a sign that read, “Dejen de Deportara Nuestras Familias – Stop Deporting Our Families.”

Marta Sanchez, left, and Columba Ortega, right, both of Mountain View, proudly display an American flag at the rally in front of city hall. (Photo: Eli Katz/ Peninsula Press)

These teenagers were DREAMers – young immigrants protected from deportation by a presidential directive issued last year. The directive’s guidelines are similar to those of the so-called DREAM Act, which has been introduced in Congress several times since 2001 to no avail. Young people qualify who entered the country before turning 16, have lived here for five years, are enrolled in school or the military, and have a clean legal record.

A study released by the Immigration Policy Center in 2012 estimated there are 65,000 eligible DREAMers in the Bay Area, enough to fill a Raiders game at Oakland’s O.co Coliseum. These numbers were originally reported in the San Jose Mercury News.

Their parents, however, are still deported in large numbers. According to data published by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, over 1.5 million undocumented immigrants have been deported since President Obama took the oath in 2009, a record for any one presidential term.

Roberto Munoz is all too familiar with this reality. He spoke at length about several local families fractured by deportations, although he withheld specific names.

He was most passionate relating the story of an East Palo Alto father, who Munoz claimed was deported for a second time earlier this month after spending the better part of six months finding a way to come back. He had only recently reunited with his wife and six year-old child.

“Sometimes the immigration take the wife, sometimes the husband, and sometimes both,” said Munoz. “It’s something that really, really hurts the families and the community.”

Munoz, who was originally an undocumented immigrant but became a citizen in 1991, has worked for five years with Peninsula Interfaith Action (PIA), an organization that unites congregations around causes such as immigration reform and helped organize the Mountain View march.

“We fight to keep the families together,” said Munoz, when asked about PIA’s mission.

Father Bob Moran, a priest at St. Joseph’s church in Mountain View was unsure how common family separations were locally. Many of the immigrant parents he knew held steady jobs, which he said puts them at much decreased risk of deportation.

“But it’s there,” Father Moran said. “I know because there is a certain fluidity in the group in terms of coming to mass on Sundays.”

The march culminated with a festive rally in front of city hall in downtown Mountain View. The keynote speaker was Bishop Patrick McGrath of San Jose’s diocese. Flanked by a band, dancers, and booming sound system, Bishop McGrath called the status quo a human rights issue. He demanded the end of immigration policy which, he said, seeks to split families

“Enforcement of the policy is immoral!” McGrath said, prompting uproarious applause.

As McGrath walked off the stage, the band played “God Bless America.”

Afterwards they burst into a more upbeat Latin tune, “De America, Yo Soy – From America, I am.”

On today’s Peninsula Report, Sharon Beltracchi and Jeremy Reman, directors of the Stanford Savoyards’ production of “The Sorcerer,” give us a behind-the-scenes look at staging a modern rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Victorian-era comic opera. Spooky incantations survived their cut.

Peninsula Press Reporter Angela Hayes swings by to tell us of the journeys fish take here in Palo Alto. Salmon and trout are leaping amongst the millionaire’s houses.

And Peninsula Press Reporter Rob Franklin brings us the story of a local census that gauges where people go when they live on the streets. Outdoor homeless encampments have been growing in Santa Clara County over the last two years, and that raises environmental concerns often missed in the conversation about housing in crisis.

Listen live to KZSU (FM 90.1) or stream the Peninsula Report online every Friday from 3-4 p.m.

Polar bears are losers, squid are winners in today’s world of climate change according to Stanford biology professor William Gilly who spoke at the university’s TEDx event Saturday. (Photo: Anna Hallingstad/ Peninsula Press)

Humans are affecting the environment in myriad ways—from putting the oceans in disarray to pushing carbon dioxide levels to new highs—and many fear there’s no going back. But a few speakers at Stanford University’s second annual TEDx event Saturday had a different message: humans can move forward on our rapidly changing planet.

Students, faculty and Bay Area residents flocked to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to soak in these and many other “Ideas Worth Spreading” — 18-minute talks by 21 dynamic and diverse speakers, including politicians, artists, and eco-thinkers.

The green highlights of the all-day event included Stanford student and solar-house project manager Derek Ouyang, biology professor William Gilly, and “Generation Anthropocene” podcasters Mike Osborne and Miles Traer.

Ouyang revealed the human side of Stanford’s inaugural entry in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, a contest that pits collegiate teams against one another to design and build a cost-effective, energy-efficient, solar-powered house. Taking the stage in the first session of TEDxStanford, Ouyang reflected that, as a child, he thought resources like water and power appeared by magic in his house. The Stanford senior, who studies architecture and civil engineering, has come a long way from those “ignorance is bliss” beginnings. Now he wants to design a solar house that does away with that ignorance from the start.

“My idea worth spreading is that homes should be energy efficient, but it’s not just the technology that makes that happen,” Ouyang said after the event. “It’s people and their understanding of their energy narrative.”

Rather than adopt what he called the Silicon Valley attitude—putting smart technology behind the scenes for an effortless user experience—Ouyang decided to make the solar house talk back. The house he helped design is fitted with displays that provide a near-constant stream of salient and meaningful feedback on water and energy usage. That way, the house’s occupants are never in the dark about their resource consumption and how to cut it back.

The solar house is currently under construction on the Stanford University campus.

TedxStanford tickets sold out within hours and the 587-seat Cemex Auditorium was packed to the gills with rapt attendees. (Photo courtesy of Tony Chen)

After lunch, marine biologist William Gilly joined the crowd to outline his favorite species’ five-point plan for surviving in today’s changing oceans. That species is the Humboldt—or jumbo—squid, a multi-talented mollusk found all along North America’s Pacific Coast.

One of the Humboldt squid’s talents is its ability to live and hunt in what is called the oxygen-limited zone. Deep and dark below the surface of the ocean, oxygen levels reach a mere quarter of what they are at the surface. The dry-land equivalent of an oxygen-limited zone would be an elevation 40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface, Gilly explained. To put it into perspective: with oxygen levels that low, “You’d have about fifteen seconds of consciousness.”

As the oceans change, this oxygen-limited zone, along with the deeper and more severe oxygen minimum zone, is expanding toward the sunlit surface. A visual predator, the Humboldt squid could actually reap benefits as their oxygen-starved prey are pushed closer and closer to the light.

Gilly, who is based at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, ended his talk by looking into the future—a future with fewer polar bears, but a lot more squid. So humans had better get used to the idea of calamari. Gilly summed up his views: “I think squid have a lot to teach us about our own place in the world—in addition to new ways of cooking them.”

In the third and final session of TEDxStanford, Mike Osborne and Miles Traer tag-teamed a talk on what they call the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, they propose, is a new geologic age shaped by human activity. But it is also a new way of looking at the world—through “Anthropocene goggles,” as Osborne and Traer dubbed the perspective.

Dozens of graphs showing exponential growth spread across the screen behind the two Stanford geology Ph.D students. Everything—the area of domesticated land, carbon dioxide concentrations, the number of cars, dammed rivers, and even McDonalds restaurants—is spiking upward toward a point that Osborne summed up as: “Oh, ****.”

Humans are changing the face of the planet. “The idea of imagining ourselves as geological forces within the geologic system is kind of cool,” Traer said. “I mean, the idea that we can compare what we’re doing to ice ages or life transforming the planet or anything like that. But then you have to wear these goggles and you have to say, ‘Wow. We are doing all this.’”

Understanding the power of human actions may help us navigate the new world we have created. Traer continued, “That’s ultimately what these Anthropocene goggles are about: what happens next.”

Osborne and Traer produce Generation Anthropocene, a podcast that interviews experts on global environmental change.

TEDxStanford 2013 was produced by Stanford University’s Office of Public Affairs, together with the Graduate School of Business, School of Earth Sciences, and Precourt Institute for Energy. TEDx events are independently organized conferences in the style of TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conferences. All 27 Stanford TEDx talks and performances will be posted online in the coming weeks.

A satellite image of Lake Erie in September 2011, layered over a map of the lake’s tributaries, shows the algal bloom six weeks after it began growing in the western basin. The algae completely covered the western basin and had begun spreading into the central basin, where it continued to grow until October. (Image: Michalak et al. 2013/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Two summers ago, a nightmarish algal bloom overwhelmed Lake Erie with a toxic scum that suffocated fish and fouled shorelines. A new Stanford University-led study finds that if policymakers don’t implement a management plan quickly, the lake can expect more of the same as the effects of climate change and fertilizer runoff take their toll.

Scientists have seen similar impacts of algal blooms elsewhere, including the marine waters off California’s coast, where agricultural and sewage pollution have helped feed other types of toxic algal blooms. Meanwhile, locals just north of the Bay Area are leading an innovative management strategy to target algal nutrient hotspots so that they can try to halt growth before it starts.

The study was published April 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team led by Anna Michalak, an associate professor in Stanford’s Department of Environmental Earth System Science. The researchers identified that weather conditions and farming practices created the ideal environment for runaway algae growth, at the expense of local Ohioans and the lake’s aquatic biodiversity. Similar conditions in the future could lead to more record-breaking algal bloom events of equal or greater magnitude, the report added.

“All these extreme [algal bloom] events depend on a number of factors coming together,” Michalak said in an interview. “There’s a number of things that are trending in the direction of making ideal conditions for these types of blooms more common.”

Without a comprehensive plan to manage the “monumental” algae growth, the authors conclude, “we can therefore expect this bloom to indeed be a harbinger of future blooms to Lake Erie.”

What might this management plan look like? While one Great Lake awaits a meaningful mitigation scheme, more than 2,000 miles away, California officials are pioneering the use of new satellite technology to pinpoint areas of dangerously high, algae-fueling phosphorus in Clear Lake, the Golden State’s oldest and largest lake. Chuck Lamb, a project volunteer and co-founder of Koncocti Regional Trails, helped bring this Blue Water Satellite technology to Lake County, Calif. last fall.

“The problem is that the county has always been in a reactionary mode,” Lamb said. The reality is, managers across the country have addressed algal blooms only once fully fleshed. Now, with the images provided by Blue Water, officials can proactively map the source phosphorus overload and grade its intensity. Most of the phosphorous in Clear Lake comes from sediments due to erosion from agricultural and urban areas, construction, gravel mining and other human activities. Fertilizer use may also contribute to Clear Lake’s phosphorous levels.

Michalak’s study found similar effects in Lake Erie, where farming practices that were conceived out of concern for the environment, like zero-tillage and autumn fertilizer application, had unintended consequences. The researchers observed a 218 percent increase in phosphorus, as well as other nutrients that promote algae growth, running off from farms into Lake Erie’s tributaries. Heavy spring rainstorms and summer heat in 2011 intensified the algal bloom set into motion by these farming practices. These extreme weather conditions are expected to become more common, according to climate change predictions.

Lake Erie is Ohio’s lifeblood.  The southernmost Great Lake supplies drinking water to roughly three million people and funnels more than $11.5 billion in annual revenue to the state from tourism, travel and recreational fishing, according to the Ohio Environmental Council. But the super-bloom forced several beaches to close and caused water treatment costs in Toledo, Ohio, to skyrocket by thousands of dollars a day. At the bloom’s peak, the lake’s surface harbored a liver toxin produced by the bloom organisms that may have reached concentrations over 200 times that deemed safe by the World Health Organization.

Jeff Ho, a graduate student in Stanford’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department and an author on the study, remains optimistic. “The sheer magnitude of the bloom is bound to turn some heads and cause some people to take notice,” he said. Just maybe, that attention will lead to action.

Anna Hallingstad, Angela Hayes, Alexei Koseff and Mallory Smith also contributed to this report.