Pittsburgh Today

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Retro pictures of Pittsburgh

Many thanks to google images for these photographs!!!!!

Ancient steel mill at work

The Epic Three Rivers Stadium

Monday, April 18, 2011

Teacher charged with stealing laptops from CAPA Also accused in last week's bank robbery

A former science teacher at the city's Creative and Performing Arts high school who was charged last week in a bank heist was arraigned this morning on new charges after police said she admitted to stealing laptop computers from the high school.
Philicia Barbieri, 24, of Shadyside, was charged with theft of 10 to 15 laptops, which police said she admitted to taking between January and March. Police said she cried as school officials told her they had surveillance footage of her taking a laptop from a school classroom in March, police wrote in a criminal complaint.
A district judge this morning ordered her to have no contact with CAPA and set a preliminary hearing for April 26.
Ms. Barbieri, charged in a Friday robbery at a Fifth Third Bank on Penn Circle South, told police she stole the laptops, worth about $22,500, to support a heroin habit.
Police said she told them she and her boyfriend Alvin Carter, 28, also charged in the bank robbery, started doing the drug about six months ago. They robbed the bank because they were desperate to pay their rent, police said she told them.
Ms. Barbieri is a 2008 graduate of Chatham University, a spokesman said. A CAPA website said she taught chemistry as well as earth and space science.

Philicia Barbieri

North Allegheny student wins national science award

Michelle Lee, a 17-year-old junior at North Allegheny High School, was announced as a national winner today of the Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition in Washington, D.C.
She wins a $50,000 scholarship.
Michelle developed a computer simulation model that determines when routine testing for the superbug known as MRSA is cost-effective. She presented her findings to a panel of judges who are leading public health experts.
A member of the public health computational and operations research team at the University of Pittsburgh, Michelle will receive a U.S. Congressional Award gold medal this year in recognition of 400 hours of volunteer work. She also is an international award-winning pianist who has performed solo six times at Carnegie Hall and once at the United Nations, having won a grand prize at the World Piano Competition. She also enjoys playing the harp and rowing. She plans to major in bioengineering or biology and chemistry.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Pa. second in U.S. for smog-producing pollution

As Congress considers whether to block rules limiting air pollutants, a new report finds that Pennsylvania's coal-fired power plants emit more unhealthy smog producing pollution than any state except Texas.
The report by PennEnvironment, a statewide environmental group, found that in 2009 Pennsylvania's 47 power plants emitted almost 110,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, which mix with other pollutants in the air on warm sunny days to form ground-level ozone, the primary component of unhealthy smog.
Texas, which has 99 power plants, emitted 138,500 tons of nitrogen oxides in 2009, based on data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Nationwide, power plants emitted almost 2 million tons of nitrogen oxides.
"Taking a breath should not leave Pennsylvania's children gasping for air," said Matthew Ward, Western Pennsylvania field representative for PennEnvironment. "Smog-forming pollution from power plants puts our children and our environment at risk, and the EPA must act to reduce this life-threatening pollution."
The release of the report coincided with congressional action on legislation aimed at limiting the EPA's ability to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.
The report also notes that according to the latest available EPA Air Quality Index data for metropolitan areas in 2008, the Pittsburgh metropolitan area had 34 days when air quality was unhealthy for "sensitive groups" -- including people with lung disease, older adults and children. There was one day that year when the air quality was bad enough to fall into the unhealthy for everyone category.
Seven metropolitan areas, all in California, had more days when air was unhealthy for sensitive groups. In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia had 26 days when the air was unhealthy for sensitive groups and four days when it was unhealthy for everyone.
Randy Francisco, the Sierra Club's organizing representative for its Coal to Clean Energy Campaign in Pennsylvania, said old, dirty power plants in Pennsylvania are damaging the health of people in the state.
"The report points out the importance of EPA regulation and why we need it to act," Mr. Francisco said. "The companies are not going to clean up themselves."
The PennEnvironment report points to the link between power plant emissions and health problems, an issue explored in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's December series, "Mapping Mortality." That eight-day series of articles and videos, along with dozens of interactive maps, showed that there were 12,833 excess deaths, based on national death rates, in the 14-county region of southwestern Pennsylvania, 2000 through 2008, for heart and respiratory disease and lung cancer. Those diseases have been linked to air pollution.

The view of the beautiful skyline of Pittsburgh from inside PNC Park. It is sad that the skyline has to be clogged with smog

Pittsburgh Penguins Daily Dirt

TueApr 5

W 4-2

New Jersey Devils

Sun Apr 10

3:00 PM ETPhilips Arena

Atlanta Thrashers

2011 OVERALL NHL RANKINGS

GOALS PER GAME

2.814th Overall

GOALS AGAINST

2.46th Overall

POWER PLAY PCT

15.525th Overall

PENALTY KILL PCT

86.51st Overall

Should Sydney Crosby Play Again This Year?

Sidney Crosby has hoisted a Stanley Cup and scored the dramatic gold-medal-winning overtime goal for Canada at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. But now his career is complicated by other images: the two violent hits to the head that Crosby suffered in back-to-back games in January, hits that left him sidelined with a belatedly diagnosed concussion just as the 23-year-old Penguins superstar was riding a transcendent scoring streak unmatched in the NHL in 20 years. So the sight of Crosby finally returning to the ice in the past week for a few of Pittsburgh's morning team skates was encouraging progress.
But that's all it should be allowed to be.
The NHL playoffs will begin next week, and the pull on Crosby to come back to play is enormous even though he's just been cleared for only light exercise, not full-contact drills. The culture of hockey constantly pushes players to play on, through anything. And the yearning among Penguins teammates for Crosby's dramatic return is obvious, too, even if the team has played astonishingly well without him and fellow star Evgeni Malkin, who's out for the season with a knee injury. As Penguins right wing Arron Asham gushed to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after Crosby's first skate back on March 31, "I'm pretty sure he could lace them up tonight and be a force."

[+] Enlarge Sidney Crosby and Tony Granato

Joel Auerbach/Getty ImagesSidney Crosby shared a few moments on the ice with assistant coach Tony Granato during a team workout April 1.

Crosby is that good.
But Penguins management should step up and make this decision for Crosby now: announce he won't be back for the rest of the season.
Take Crosby off the hook and say: This is on us, Sid.
Continue to let him work out in all the morning skates he wants, if only to break the tedium of his recovery or to be back among his teammates. "I'd never want to take hope away from a player," Penguins general manager Ray Shero said upon Crosby's limited return last week. That's understandable, but end it there. Stop the growing noise about Crosby coming back for some dramatic Stanley Cup run before such talk snowballs any more.
Shero has steadfastly said there's no timetable to bring Crosby back. But the franchise should go further. Restate clearly, unequivocally that the postconcussion symptoms that Crosby has been suffering are signs that this is not the sort of injury anyone can "will" himself back from -- not even hockey players. Shutting him down is the only action that makes sense. Keep reminding people that medical experts and others who have been studying this issue for years don't know enough to predict whether it's safe for Crosby to return.
Crosby is just days into finally skating a little without getting symptoms. But that doesn't mean he should take another hit any time soon.
The Penguins should fight everything that the culture of hockey suggests and instead give into one thing that concussion experts can say with total certainty:
"We can be sure that more rest won't harm him; more rest would only help," says Blaine Hoshizaki, a biomechanics and neurophysics scientist who has studied how concussions occur.
Along with his research team at the University of Ottawa Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory, Hoshizaki has recreated thousands of brain injuries, including many NHL and NFL concussions, during the past few years. His work includes some videotape studies of the injurious hits on Crosby and Montreal's Max Pacioretty that should leave you never looking at the hits that athletes routinely absorb quite the same way.
Hoshizaki's work helps create safer equipment, and he studies what sort of hits -- straight-on (or linear) versus angular (or sideways) impacts -- cause brain trauma. He emphasizes, "The work we do doesn't speak to return-to-play guidelines, though it could in the long run. But it's clear even just from a business standpoint, to bring Crosby back at this point makes no sense at all. Not for his future. Not for his team or his league. They're not going to sell one more tickets by bringing him back. And the long-term risk is just not worth it, not even if they did go on to win the Stanley Cup.

[+] Enlarge Penguins fan

Joel Auerbach/Getty ImagesPenguins fans would love to see Sidney Crosby back in the lineup for the playoffs.

"As our recreations showed, what he suffered was a high-risk hit that resulted in a high-risk brain injury."
The two hits that sidelined Crosby are bad enough when seen just with the naked eye or in normal slow-motion replay. The first -- a shoulder to the side of Crosby's head from then-Washington forward David Steckel, who blindsided Crosby in the NHL Winter Classic on Jan. 1 -- snapped Crosby's neck back and sent his 200-pound body helicoptering through the air before he slammed to the ice. When Crosby finally tried to get up, he was groggy and barely holding onto his mouthpiece. Eventually, he somehow skated, still doubled over, back to the bench. He played in the Penguins' next game four nights later despite a sore neck only to have Tampa Bay's Victor Hedman slam his head against the Plexiglas boards with loud bang and rattle. Again, Crosby crumpled to the ice.
Three months later, he has yet to play.
But as jarring as both hits look, the Steckel hit acquires a far more disturbing dimension in videos of lab simulations Hoshizaki and his team have done using a crash test dummy's head that's wearing a hockey helmet and then slammed with a padded arm at the precise angle, speed and place that Crosby was hit by Steckel. The scientists calculated the 217-pound Steckel was traveling at nearly 20 mph and delivered an instantaneous peak force of approximately 850 pounds to the side of Crosby's head.
The beeping countdown before the blow is enough to make you queasy even before you see and hear what's coming next in the video: a loud impact that sends the dummy's head snapping sideways and rotating around on its cantilevered neck just as Crosby's did in real life. Hoshizaki explains that most of this detail is not discernible to the naked human eye, which can comprehend things at only about 25 to 26 frames a second. When recorded at about 2,000 frames a second in the lab and played back more slowly, the violence of the impact Crosby's head absorbed is gruesome.
The same goes for the NISL's recreation of a hit that Montreal's Max Pacioretty took in March from 6-foot-9 Boston defenseman Zdeno Chara. That hit left Pacioretty concussed and temporarily unconscious, and it broke a vertebra in Pacioretty's neck, touching off an even bigger firestorm and national debate than the hits on Crosby.
Watching the Pacioretty recreation, you wonder how his head didn't roll off.
Both videos help illustrate why athletes' brains get hurt, and stay hurt -- sometimes for years.
They also should be enough evidence to silence all these ersatz tough guys who are shouting that Crosby "owes it" to Penguins to try to return if his symptoms stay away.
No. He doesn't.
And the encouraging thing is, Crosby seems to be taking the safety-first advice he's been getting from Penguins management and many of the former and current players he and his agent, Pat Brisson, have contacted.

[+] Enlarge Keith Primeau

Harry How/Getty ImagesKeith Primeau had a magical playoff run in 2004 that almost resulted in a Stanley Cup. That was basically the end of his career.

One of them is Keith Primeau, a bruising star center who found himself at a juncture similar to where Crosby is now and decided to play through two concussions he suffered during the 2004 NHL playoffs. Primeau played spectacularly, driving the Flyers one win short of reaching the Stanley Cup finals. But Primeau missed 73 games the next season. He finally, begrudgingly, tearfully admitted he had to retire after trying another comeback in September '06 when Flyers trainer Jim McCrossin told Primeau he could never in good conscience clear him to play again.
Primeau, now 39, says that bluntness was the sort of reality check he needed at the time. Nearly five years removed now from his last game, he admits, "I didn't have a very good summer or fall last year." Meaning? "I still have postconcussion symptoms -- head pressure, vision problems, headaches, an inability to exercise sometimes without getting dizzy and nauseous."
But Primeau isn't keeping quiet about it. Just this week, in conjunction with partners such as Sports Safety Labs, Primeau launched a program called StopConcussions.com, and a related, free iPhone application.
"Right now, the app is just the first generation of it, but we hope to develop it even more going forward," Primeau says. "It's a free download that helps people access things like a $5 cognitive assessment test that allows parents or coaches or trainers to have something readily available to check a player's condition who might have a concussion. There's also a Google maps feature where you enter information and can find the nearest medical center to your location if, for example, you're at a sporting event and think you need to get someone help quickly."
Primeau hopes it will be one more tool that can make a difference. "But my fear," he says, "is that there's this thought process now [about the seriousness of concussions] that is going to go away. That it's just the injury du jour. The ACL injury of 2011."
Neither Hoshizaki nor Primeau goes as far as Dr. Paul Echlin, who slammed the Penguins' handling of Crosby's initial hit. "All the red flags [were] up," Echlin told Maclean's magazine in February. "To have a player concussed a second time is completely irresponsible."
But both Hoshizaki and Primeau say the NHL is not doing all it can despite rule changes that ban some hits to the head and recent changes to the protocols on how players who may have concussions are assessed during games.
"We work with people in hockey and the NHL all the time, and in my view they still need to be more educated." Hoshizaki said. "Part of it goes back to the culture of the sport. I'm not sure the resolve is there yet."
"The NHL is trying, but it's not moving fast enough." Primeau said.
The Penguins can control that. They can do Crosby a favor. Sometime in the next week, the team needs to sit Crosby down and say, We love you, miss you and desperately want to have you back for Stanley Cup playoffs, kid.
But not this season.
"I couldn't say it for myself at the time, but I can now, and I told Sidney's agent this -- it's just not worth it," Primeau said.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011