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In the United States, a German belief about the badger (applied in Switzerland to the wolf) has been transferred to the woodchuck, better known as the groundhog: on Candlemas he breaks his hibernation in order to observe the weather; if he can see his shadow he returns to his slumbers for six weeks, but if it rains he stays up and about, since winter will soon be over. This has earned Candlemas the name of ‘Groundhog Day’. In Quarryville, Lancaster County, Pa., a Slumbering Groundhog Lodge was formed, whose members, wearing silk hats and carrying canes, went out in search of a groundhog burrow; on finding one they watched its inhabitant’s conduct and reported back. Of twenty observations recorded, eight prognostications proved true, seven false, and five were indeterminate. The ritual is now carried on at Punxsutawney, Pa., where the weather prophet has been named Punxsutawney Phil. (The Oxford Companion to the Year)

By Sydney Beveridge

Every February Second, people across Pennsylvania and the world look to a famous rodent to answer the question—when will spring come?

For over 120 years, Punxsutawney Phil Soweby (Punxsutawney Phil for short) has offered his predictions, based on whether he sees his shadow (more winter) or not (an early spring).

The first official Groundhog Day celebration took place in 1887 and Phil has gone on to star in a blockbuster film, dominate the early February news cycle, and even appear on Oprah. (He also has his own Beanie Baby and his own flower.)

In addition to weather predictions, Phil also loves data, and while people think he is hibernating, he is actually conducting demographic analysis. As a Social Explorer subscriber, he used the site’s mapping and reporting tools to look at the composition of his hometown.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Punxsutawney, PA, located outside of Pittsburgh, is part of Jefferson County. Examining Census data from 1890, Phil learned that the population was 44,405 around the time of his first predictions. While the rest of the nation was becoming more urban, Jefferson County remained more rural with only one eighth of the population living in places with 2,500 people or more (compared to nearly half statewide and more than a third in the US).

Many Jefferson residents worked in the farming industry. Back then, there were 3.2 families for every farm in Jefferson County — higher than the rest of the state with 5.0 families per farm.

Less than three decades after the Civil War, the county (located in a northern state) was 99.9 percent white, which was a little higher than statewide (97.9 percent) and also higher than nationwide 87.8 percent. (The Census also noted that there was one Chinese resident of Jefferson County in 1890.)

Groundhog Day was originally called Candlemas, a day that Germans said the hibernating groundhog took a break from slumbering to check the weather. (According to the Oxford Companion to the Year.) If the creature sees its shadow, and is frightened, winter will hold on and hibernating will continue, but if not, the groundhog will stay awake and spring will come early. Back in 1890, there were 703 Germans living in Jefferson County (representing 1.6 percent of the county population and 11.3 percent of the foreign born), making Germany the fourth most common foreign born place of birth behind England, Scotland, and Austria. Groundhog Day is also said to be Celtic in its roots, so perhaps the 623 Irish residents (representing 1.4 percent of the county population and 10.1 percent of the foreign born) helped to establish the tradition in Pennsylvania.

Looking to today’s numbers, Phil was astonished to learn from the 2010 Census that Jefferson County has just 795 more people than it did 120 years ago. While Jefferson grew by 1.8 percent, the state grew by 141.6 percent and the nation grew by 393.0 percent.

Phil dug deeper. The 2008-10 American Community Survey data reveal that the once-prominent farming industry had shrunk considerably. (Because it is a small group, “agriculture” is now grouped with other industries including forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining.) While Jefferson residents are more likely to work in the industry than other Pennsylvanians, that share represents just 4.4 percent of the employed civilian workforce.

According to the Census, Jefferson is still predominately white (98.3 percent), while the rest of the state and nation have become somewhat more diverse (81.9 percent white in Pennsylvania and 72.4 percent nationwide). Today there are 24 Chinese residents (out of a total of 92 Asian residents).

As Phil rises from his burrow this February second, he will survey the shadows with new insight into his community and audience. To learn more about Punxsutawney Phil’s hometown burrow (and your own borough), please visit our mapping and reporting tools.

Sydney Beveridge is the Media and Content Editor for Social Explorer, where she works on the blog, curriculum materials, how-to-videos, social media outreach, presentations and strategic planning. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A version of this article originally appeared on the Social Explorer blog. You can use Social Explorer’s mapping and reporting tools to investigate dreams, freedoms, and equality further.

Social Explorer is an online research tool designed to provide quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information. The easy-to-use web interface lets users create maps and reports to better illustrate, analyze and understand demography and social change. From research libraries to classrooms to the front page of the New York Times, Social Explorer is helping people engage with society and science.

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The post Burrowing into Punxsutawney Phil’s hometown data appeared first on OUPblog.

Sarah Price, popular author of Amish fiction, is also a contributor to the One series, which is regularly posted about on this blog. Her story, The Power of Faith, is currently available for ONLY 99 Cents with author proceeds going to a great cause. You can get it here: http://goo.gl/xhE9w

This weekend I hung out in Harrisburg with Jonathan Bean, Taeeun Yoo, and Lauren Castillo for 3rd in the Burg. The third Friday of every month, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, artists open their doors and invite the community into their studios to learn about their work and process.

Taeeun at the opening ceremony

During that time Jonathan Bean hosts an art show in “The Steps Shown”, his charming stairwell gallery. Jonathan shows sketches, dummies, and final work of children’s book illustrators, the work that is usually never seen by the general public.

choosing work for the gallery

On Saturday morning we walked a few steps down the street to listen to Taeeun read and sign her books at The Midtown Scholar’s Children’s Section. The fab four hasn’t been together all in one place in quite some time. It was a historic reunion for us all.

The Fab Four in full effect

To see a wonderful video of Taeeun reading from her latest book, YOU ARE A LION, head here.

Taeeun Yoo with fish and lions

Shadra said, on 8/20/2012 10:23:00 AM

This weekend I hung out in Harrisburg with Jonathan Bean, Taeeun Yoo, and Lauren Castillo for 3rd in the Burg. The third Friday of every month, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, artists open their doors and invite the community into their studios to learn about their work and process.

Taeeun at the opening ceremony

During that time Jonathan Bean hosts an art show in “The Steps Shown”, his charming stairwell gallery. Jonathan shows sketches, dummies, and final work of children’s book illustrators, the work that is usually never seen by the general public.

choosing work for the gallery

On Saturday morning we walked a few steps down the street to listen to Taeeun read and sign her books at The Midtown Scholar’s Children’s Section. The fab four hasn’t been together all in one place in quite some time. It was a historic reunion for us all.

The Fab Four in full effect

To see a wonderful video of Taeeun reading from her latest book, YOU ARE A LION, head here.

Taeeun Yoo with fish and lions

 

“What a great program today! The smiles on the children’s faces when they received their books; the excitement they had getting the First Book shirts, and how proud they were wearing them; seeing the enthusiasm of the volunteers reading to the students … Thank you for the program and putting more books in our children’s hands.” — MaryAnn Amato , VTCS teacher

Last week, First Book staffers went to visit Vitalistic Therapeutic Charter School (VTCS) in Bethlehem, Pa., where each student received three brand-new books of their own. VTCS also received a $1,000 credit for the First Book Marketplace to fill the shelves of their library.

VTCS is one of 60 schools and programs in the Lehigh Valley serving low-income children that received grants. Altogether, 10,000 new books will go to Lehigh Valley schools, all paid for through the grants (made possible by our friends at C&S Wholesale Grocers).

The First Book team had a great time with the kids from VTCS, and so did all the local C&S Wholesale Grocers employees who showed up. We even made the news.

First Book is coming to Pittsburgh, and we’re looking for volunteers to help us distribute 500,000 new books to schools and programs serving children from low-income families across the country.

The books are in a warehouse in Sewickley, PA (just outside of Pittsburgh), and we need as many volunteers as we can get to help us box them up and ship them out. Most of the help we need is physical labor: lifting, carrying and sorting boxes. We also need help with some less physically-demanding tasks, like labeling boxes and assisting First Book staff.

We need volunteers from 9 am until 4 pm on the following days:

• Tuesday, May 16
• Wednesday, May 17
• Thursday, May 18

You’re welcome to volunteer for the full day or part of the day. We need 15-20 volunteers at all times, so please spread the word about this opportunity and bring your friends, kids, wives, husbands, neighbors, second cousins and co-workers! (Volunteers must be at least 16 years old).

Help us get books to kids who need them!

To volunteer, please contact Anna Taleysnik-Mehta at First Book (e-mail ataleysnik(at)firstbook.org or call us toll-free at 866-READ-NOW).

You can learn more about First Book and what we do at firstbook.org.

We move a lot of books at First Book. Over five million books last year, to schools and programs serving kids from low-income communities, and those cases of books are HEAVY.

Sometimes people assume we have a warehouse somewhere, maybe at our national headquarters in DC. We definitely do not. (Our staff is doubled up in many of our offices, so there is definitely no room for giant pallets filled with books. Not to mention the difficulty of driving great big trucks through the streets of our nation’s capital).

So where do all these books come from?

When our friends at publishing companies donate books to First Book, we need warehouses to put them in. In years past, we have relied on a network of generous volunteers throughout the country, and we continue to do so. But with donated space you sometimes have to move inventory in and out quickly, and it can be hard to plan in advance.

So First Book, in partnership with an innovative high school program in Martinsburg, West Virginia, decided to put students to work moving our books around.

“What First Book has been able to do has totally revitalized the program,” said Doc Greenfield, who runs the warehouse program in Martinsburg. “Now, working with First Book, we have real product, real purpose and real customers.”

Warehouse management and materials handling are useful skills to have in today’s job market, and there are programs in high schools all over the country that teach them. But not many companies want to trust their inventory to warehouse workers who lack experience, so the students in these programs often resort to moving empty grocery boxes. Helpful, but not as helpful as dealing with real inventory.

However, it just so happens that First Book has TONS of real inventory, in the form of books. And we mean tons. And, since we want to spend every last penny we can getting new books into the hands of kids in need, we’re happy to trust those pallets to students in warehouse programs. (It turns out that the students do every bit as good a job as the professionals). On top of that, every school warehouse program we work with gets to keep a small portion of the books for eligible programs their community.

Greenfield runs a two-year program, and he has many success stories; it’s been easier for his students to get work with their hands-on experience. “I’m trying to get them ready for the real world,” he said.

In addition to Greenfield’s program in West Virginia, First Book works with warehouse programs in Altoona, Pa., Rock Hill, S.C., and Lake City, Fla., and we’re working to sign up several more.

The program has been a great partnership, with major benefits for First Book – letting us control our inventory of books to make sure they go to the places that need them.

“At any given point in time, we can hold half-a-million books,” said Rachael Voorhees, who heads up First Book’s logistics team. “We’ve never been able to say that before. It’s huge.”

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Images of people about to die surface repeatedly in the news and their appearance raises questions: What equips an image to deliver the news; how much does the public need to know to make sense of what they see; and what do these images contribute to historical memory? These images call on us to rethink both journalism and its public response, and in so doing they suggest both an alternative voice in the news – a subjunctive voice of the visual that pushes the ‘as if’ of news over its ‘as is’ dimensions – and an alternative mode of public engagement with journalism – an engagement fueled not by reason and understanding but by imagination and emotion.

In About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Barbie Zelizer suggests that a different kind of news relay, producing a different kind of public response, has settled into our information environment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is posted courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication (c) 2010.

Barbie Zelizer is Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of several collections and the author of Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory, and most recently About to Die: How News Images Move the Public.

If you’d like to learn more, you can watch Zelizer’s lecture from this December at McNally Jackson Books.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at quid pro quo. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

A quid pro quo refers to a relatively equal exchange of goods and services. In the emerging controversy over whether or not the White House had attempted to bribe Congressman Joe Sestak, the quid would be the White House job offer and the quo would be the return favor that Sestak drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Primary.

The White House has four ways of getting out of the legal trouble of having potentially offered a bribe. The first two are inconsistent, the third is persuasive, and the fourth is circular, but an utterly unassailable argument.

1. There was no quid.

The White House has centered its response on saying that there really was no quid offered, because only an uncompensated board membership was offered. White House Counsel Robert Bauer issued a memo on the Joe Sestak “job” talks on Friday, saying “Efforts were made in June and July of 2009 to determine whether Congressman Sestak would be interested in service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board … The advisory positions discussed with Congressman Sestak, while important to the work of the Administration, would have been uncompensated.”
What is interesting is that while the White House is admitting that a quo was suggested, a quid was never offered. An uncompensated advisory position, according to the White House, is not a job or at least no one that rises up to being a premise for a quid pro quo.

2. There was no pro quo.

In contrast, Congressman Sestak has acknowledged that while a job offer was made, he has thus far not claimed that attached to it was an explicit and directly connected White House request which he was bound to honor should he accept this job.
The Congressman realizes that he has spoken out of line and angered many Democratic Party leaders, because he has given fodder to the Republicans to create a potential Obamagate. That is why, he felt compelled to justify himself. On Meet the Press last Sunday, he said, “I felt that I needed to answer that question honestly … I was offered a job, and I answered that.” Importantly, he did not say that he was offered a job in return for not running for the Senate. If no quo, then no quid pro quo.

3. Quid pro quos are not illegal.

US Code Section 600 reads:
“Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
The fact is no

So if you read the papers at all, you know that even though things are tough, people use libraries like crazy. That said, libraries are getting funding cuts, despite, in many cases, increased use. This sucks. One of the things about living in Vermont is that there’s not that much to even trim from our budgets, but the state library (and the newish state librarian whose job I do not envy at all) closed one of Vermont’s very few regional libraries to the public and libraries who want to borrow materials now have to make appointments. This is at a time when library circulation in the state is up amost six percent and local tax support is up five percent. In other state library news

• Ohio’s libraries are looking at a potential 50% funding cut. The Shuttered Library blog has been set up to track this issue.
• The State Library of Michigan (almong with other Michigan state government offices) is implementing unpaid furlough days on Fridays through the summer.
• Pennsylvania will consider themselves lucky if they wind up with level funding after defeating a bill that proposed 50% cuts.
• Nevada State Library is cutting hours, from being open to the public 8-5 to being open 10-2.

Here's a story from Pennsylvania about a house rental that didn't quite work out as planned.

First off I'd like to say if you put this on your site, which I give you full permission to do, I only ask that you keep my name a secret for my own safety...

My family and I rented this house in Pennsylvania. It was fairly cheap, and at the time we thought nothing of it. Well, as we were moving in we found that the basement door was locked and we didn't have a key, so being the curious people we are, we knocked the door down.. only to find that downstairs was an area on the wall painted over with black paint. So we put all of our extra stuff down there and thought nothing of the paint on the wall... but we should have.

Things started out small and we figured it was just an old house, right? Wrong. As time went on "it" as we called it got madder and madder at us... it began to shake everything violently and flick light switches, even call out our names at night, trying to lure us to the basement. We began to get frightened but thought paranormal teams wouldn't believe us. So we got an Ouiji board and began to ask "it" questions, first we asked "is there some presence in this house?" it replied "Y-E-S" so next we asked "what is your name?" and it replied "S-E-T-H" so we asked Seth when he was alive, and what we got shocked us--Seth replied "N-E-V-E-R". As it turns out, Seth was a demon... we very quickly boarded up the basement and paid our last rent payment and moved out... never to return to that house again.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you put my story up on the site.

Thank you. Sounds like moving out was right move!

The fifty-degree chill, the blue skies. The afternoon left open by work that finished itself sooner than planned. We took a drive along almost empty roads, increasingly horse-drawn-carriage roads. Bill had his camera. I had mine. No one bothered us.

There was one man on horseback high on a wavering hill.

There was a stubby-legged horse in a pasture of cows.

There were glints of unpicked corn in a dried-out patch.

There were pumpkins and two boys playing baseball.

There was this line of laundry hung out to dry.

I have not written any literary thing but this blog for too long now. Too much work in my head, a congestion. Today felt like the beginning of breathing. The remembering of seeing. A particle of romance.

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