Poor count estimates plague New England fisheries

BOSTON — What science says about the number of fish in the waters off New England shapes the rules that govern the region's struggling fishing fleet. And lately for key species, those estimates have been way off.

Some federal population estimates for bottom-dwelling groundfish, such as cod and flounder, have swung wildly. That leaves fishermen scrambling to deal with sudden drops or gains in the portfolio of stocks they depend on to make a living. In addition, a pattern has emerged showing the same bad predictions about key fish species are repeated.

Some question how population estimates with such obvious flaws can be used to as a basis for steep cuts in the catches, including massive reductions enacted in May.

"I think it's irresponsible to shut down fisheries based on such inaccurate stock assessments," said Steve Cadrin, a former federal stock assessment scientist and a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

Federal scientists acknowledge errors in assessments of critical New England fish stocks and say they're working hard to fix them. But they add that their overall methods are proven sound.

Chris Legault, an assessment scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, noted that the same types of data and methods have been used successfully in most fisheries nationwide, including in the Northeast and in the healthy Mid-Atlantic fishery just to the south.

"There is an ability to make these predictions ... and have some confidence in them," Legault said.

Counting fish is notoriously tough. Fishery scientists joke it's just like counting trees in the forest — if the trees were invisible and moving. But stock assessments try to draw as precise a picture as possible.

Complex data about the fish, such as the amount of a given species at a certain age, is estimated through ocean surveys or historical data. It's then run through scientific models to project the species' population. Regional and federal managers, guided by the scientific advice, then decide how much is safe to take out without overfishing the stock,

But if the underlying population estimates are way off, the scientific advice becomes worthless.

Lately, there's no proof the science is capable of giving the accurate advice regulators need, said Gloucester fisherman Vito Giacalone. "All the proof, really, is that it's not capable."

The saga of the Gulf of Maine cod offers the prime example of a faulty assessment. Deemed robust in 2008, by 2011 the stock was said to be struggling so badly that huge cuts were needed to protect it. In May, fishermen took a devastating year-to-year cut in their catch allotment of 78 percent. Many fishermen say a cut that steep simply doesn't allow them to catch enough fish to stay in business.

Meanwhile, the assessments of certain flounder, haddock and cod stocks have been plagued by a persistent flaw that causes future populations to be overestimated while projections of how much fishermen will catch are underestimated. So fishermen can be told to catch a certain amount one year, only to learn later it was too much, and a cut is coming for future seasons.

In the midst of the problems, the Groundfish Plan Development Team, a group of fishery analysts and experts, has fretted over the reliability of the assessments.

"If there is no confidence in the projections, then it seems they should not be used to determine if a particular catch will end overfishing or rebuild as required," the team wrote last August.

Peter Shelley of the Conservation Law Foundation believes the science is being thrown off by flawed data, which he said is likely missing unreported amounts of discarded or illegally caught fish. And he blames fishery managers for caving to political pressure and pushing the fishery to its weakened state by constantly opting for the highest possible catches.

Dealing with struggling stocks is also likely a factor in the bad predictions, Legault said.

"When the stocks are really low, it becomes very difficult to make these predictions because small, random events suddenly become magnified," he said.

The significant uncertainty doesn't shut down the demands of fishery law, which requires regulators to act on the best available information. That's even if, as recent assessments have indicated, it might not be that good.

The Northeast's top federal scientist, Bill Karp, said the law is asking science to know more about the behavior of some fish stocks in the dynamic New England fishery than it can currently deliver.

"It's clearly not good enough to answer some of these questions," he said.

Fishery law also mandates rebuilding troubled fish stocks in 10 years. Tom Nies, executive director of the New England Fishery Management Council, said that assumes regulators know the population of that fish now, what its healthy population looks like and how to get it there. "We often don't know any of those with any certainty," he said. There should be ways for managers to account for that uncertainty, he said, and ensure catch quotas don't spike or plummet based on one assessment.

Giacalone envisions an entirely new way of doing business, with assessment methods that better account for water temperatures, food supply and other environmental factors that make fish move, congregate and thrive.

"I think 15, 20 years (from now) we'll look back at this period as us operating like the world was flat," he said.

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Amusement park regulations, inspections vary in US

DALLAS — From Six Flags to Walt Disney World, there's no federal oversight of permanent amusement parks, and regulations vary from state to state.

The death of a woman who fell 75 feet from Six Flags Over Texas' Texas Giant roller coaster is reinvigorating discussion among safety experts about whether it's time to create more consistent, stringent regulations for thrill rides across the nation.

"A baby stroller is subject to tougher federal regulation than a roller coaster carrying a child in excess of 100 miles per hour," Massachusetts Sen. Edward J. Markey, a Democrat, said in a statement this week. As a congressman, Markey tried for years to have the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission — which oversees mobile carnival rides — regulate fixed-site amusement parks.

But a spokeswoman with the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions countered that the trade group believes state officials "are best able to determine the level of regulation needed for their state."

In Texas, the Department of Insurance requires that an amusement park's insurance company perform a yearly inspection and carry $1 million liability insurance on each ride, agency spokesman Jerry Hagins said. Six Flags Over Texas was in compliance with those rules at the time of Rose Ayala-Goana's July 19 fatal fall from the wooden coaster with steel rails that features a drop of 79 degrees and banked turns.

Six Flags Entertainment Corp. President and CEO Jim Reid-Anderson has said it's using "both internal and external experts" to investigate Ayala-Goana's death in Arlington. An official with the German manufacturer of the roller coaster's car told The Dallas Morning News they would send officials to inspect the ride, but referred all questions The Associated Press might have to Six Flags.

The park doesn't need to submit a report to the state on what caused her to fall, and while Arlington police are also looking into the death, they aren't investigating the ride.

"The question is: Will they release it and will it be complete and comprehensive?" said Ken Martin, an amusement ride safety analyst who owns KRM Consulting of Richmond, Va. "There's a lot of unanswered questions and because of the way it is in Texas we might not ever have the answer to those questions."

Walter S. Reiss, an amusement ride safety inspector based in Bethlehem, Pa., agreed: "When it comes time for an accident it sure would be nice if the state would be that omniscient third party to come in and do that investigation."

Martin noted that both the stringency of inspection regulations and which entity oversees those inspections vary across the country.

"In some states you have the Department of Agriculture, some states you have the Department of Labor. In Texas it's the Department of Insurance. In Virginia it happens to be the local building inspector," Martin said.

An annual inspection that's submitted to Texas would check everything from the structure's wood and foundation to the cars and its wheels, as well as a review of the maintenance records, he said. It's also typical in the industry for the park's maintenance staff to inspect a ride daily, he said.

After an injury that requires medical attention and is possibly due to equipment failure, structural failure or operator error, Texas parks must shut down the ride and re-inspect it. The Texas Giant has been closed since Ayana-Goala's death and won't re-open until the department sees a new safety inspection report, Hagins said.

Amusement park trade group spokeswoman Colleen Mangone said 44 state governments regulate parks. The six without state oversight — Alabama, Mississippi, Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah — have few amusement parks, if any, she said.

"There is no evidence that federal oversight would improve on the already excellent safety record of the industry," she said, noting the association's statistics show the likelihood of being seriously injured is 1 in 24 million; for dying, it's 1 in 750 million.

"Safety is the number one priority for the amusement park industry and events like the one at Six Flags Over Texas are rare," she wrote, adding that ride manufacturer guidelines might require additional inspections beyond daily ones.

Mangone said the statistics come from an injury survey done for the trade group by the National Safety Council, though just 144 of the 383 eligible amusement parks provided some or all of the requested data.

Experts say getting reliable figures on injuries at amusement parks can be difficult.

"We don't know if they are indeed what the park says they are," Martin said. "We have to take their word for it."

Even sorting through emergency room data for a recent study on amusement ride injuries in those 17 and under was difficult, said Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

"We had to actually painstakingly go through and look at every case to see whether it was a true ride or not," said Smith, who was an author on the study published in Clinical Pediatrics in May.

"Knowing how many millions of people use (large theme parks) each year, they have a good safety record but there's always room for improvement and one of the ways that you can do that is have a good handle on where the injuries are occurring and how they're occurring," Smith said.

Voluntary standards for amusement park rides are issued by ASTM International, a global organization that draws from, among others, industry professionals. Martin said some states have adopted those standards into law.

"The amusement park industry is self-regulated and that's what the amusement industry wants," Martin said.

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Ford recalls some 2013 C-Max hybrids over roofs

DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. is recalling 33,021 C-Max hybrid cars because they may not adequately protect occupants' heads in a crash.

Vehicles involved were made between Jan. 19, 2012, and June 25, 2013 and don't have panoramic roofs. C-Max hybrids with panoramic glass roofs aren't involved in the recall.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discovered during vehicle testing that the car failed to conform to safety standards pertaining to head injury risk. Ford says there have been no reported injuries related to the issue.

Ford will notify owners of the recall next month. Dealers will install additional energy absorbing material between the car's headliner and the roof.

Owners may also contact the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Vehicle Safety Hotline at 1-888-327-4236 (TTY 1-800-424-9153), or go to www.safercar.gov.

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Translating the tech

When Joe Morone, Jon Warman and Diana Brazzell were dorm mates at Brown University, they shared a vision of the importance of higher education and academic research, but they also knew that research, detailed in academic journals, could often be long, dense and inaccessible to the general public.

So in the fall of 2011, years after their graduation, they founded Footnote, a startup that collaborates with scholars to translate the most technical language into layman's terms — a CliffsNotes, if you will, for academic journals.

"Every year, 1.6 million articles are published in academic journals, but once the research is published, very few people end up seeing it because it's written for an audience of peers," Morone said.

"Our goal is to be a conduit between academic research and intellectually curious readers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and educators."

To do that, Footnote's editorial team works with researchers from Harvard, MIT, Yale and some of the nation's other top universities to craft articles based on those found in academic journals.

Subjects range broadly, from what happens to children when a parent goes to prison, to whether government should intervene to make people healthier.

"We look for issues we think are important and that can be impacted by the latest research," said Morone, whose company was named one of 128 MassChallenge finalists earlier this year.

"The challenge is how do we make better use of this information? We want to deliver brilliant research and expertise on issues that matter in a way that people can use."

Jesse Lyons, a postdoctoral researcher in systems biology at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, has written Footnote articles on multiple subjects, including how light affects the brain, whether stem cells offer a cure for deafness, and whether a drug that decreases sperm count in mice could lead to a birth control pill for men.

"The goal is to make specialized academic research accessible and engaging without losing the complexity," Lyons explained.

"We want to make it understandable without dumbing it down."

Footnote is partnering with the College and University Research Collaborative in Providence, where top policymakers in Rhode Island have gone with questions about economic development.

The collaborative takes their questions to researchers, whose answers Footnote then translates.

"It's absolutely so important to the work we're doing," said Amber Gilfert, the collaborative's program director.

"We see Footnote providing that key piece, taking research and putting it into a format that our policy leaders and community can easily understand," Gilfert said.

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Student entrepreneurs venture into business

Fresh-roasted coffee, artisan mango liqueur and glow-in-the-dark ultimate frisbee gear — those are some of the products ready to launch out of a Babson College summer crash course for young entrepreneurs.

The 10-week summer venture program featured 14 proposals from undergraduate and MBA students, hand-picked from more than 100 applications. The students presented their products last week to an auditorium packed with potential investors and mentors at the Wellesley school.

"It's a 10-week summer camp for our best and brightest young entrepreneurs," program director Steve Gold said.

Many of the companies were the result of years of planning and experience, but were jump-started by the program.

Hans Homberger, an MBA student from Costa Rica, unveiled a plan to sell the coffee beans his family has grown for four generations directly to consumers under the family name for the first time.

"I grew up looking at my grandpa and my dad going every week to the farms. It's not just the business, it's something I feel passionate about," Homberger said.

Homberger presented Fourth Wheel Coffee, his business that will ship Central American coffee directly to customers' front doors within 15 days of roasting instead of the months that commercial coffee can spend in a warehouse, 
he said.

"I've been working on this concept for over a year. In these past 10 weeks, I feel like I was really pushed to question everything I had learned already," said MBA student Emily Lagasse. "Because of that, I have a final product that I am 100 percent confident in and ready to move forward with."

Her gourmet dog food business, Fedwell, was inspired by the near-death experience of her dog. Lagasse said her high-end dog food is made without chemicals or preservatives and is more nutritious than conventional dog food.

Because of the presentations, many of the students made connections with key investors and industry insiders, Gold said.

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Radio, TV personality David 'Kidd' Kraddick dies

David "Kidd" Kraddick, the high-octane radio and TV host of the "Kidd Kraddick in the Morning" show heard on dozens of U.S. radio stations, has died at a charity golf event near New Orleans, a publicist said. Kraddick was 53.

The Texas-based radio and television personality, whose program is syndicated by YEA Networks, died at his Kidd's Kids charity function in the New Orleans suburb of Gretna on Saturday, said publicist Ladd Biro in releasing a network statement.

"He died doing what he loved," said Biro, of the public relations firm Champion Management, speaking with AP by phone early Sunday. He said he had no further details on the death.

The "Kidd Kraddick in the Morning" show is heard on more than 75 Top 40 and Hot AC radio stations and is a leader among most-listened-to contemporary morning programs, Biro said. The radio program also is transmitted globally on American Forces Radio Network while the show's cast is also seen weeknights on the nationally syndicated TV show "Dish Nation," he added.

"All of us with YEA Networks and the "Kidd Kraddick in the Morning" crew are heartbroken over the loss of our dear friend and leader," the network statement said. "Kidd devoted his life to making people smile every morning, and for 21 years his foundation has been dedicated to bringing joy to thousands of chronically and terminally ill children."

"He died doing what he loved, and his final day was spent selflessly focused on those special children that meant the world to him," it added.

The Dallas Morning News reported Kraddick had been a staple in the Dallas market since 1984, starting in a late-night debut. The newspaper said he moved into morning show work by the early 1990s in that market and his show began to gain wider acclaim and entered into syndication by 2001 as he gained a following in cities nationwide.

Kraddick would have turned 54 on Aug. 22, according to Biro.

The network statement said the cause of death would be released "at the appropriate time."

Many fans, celebrities included, tweeted condolences and talked about the death on social media sites. One Texas radio station where he was a mainstay ran photographs on its website of Kraddick at the microphone.

Word of Kraddick's passing spread quickly via social media.

"RIP Kidd Kraddick. You were an amazing man and a friend. You are already missed," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban tweeted.

"Oh Man, I just heard Kidd Kraddick died! He's my childhood dj. What a sad day. His poor family. He was always nice 2 me from the beginning," singer Kelly Clarkson tweeted.

Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, only recently announced as the headline act of a planned first-ever Kidd's Kids charity concert in Dallas next month, wrote: "The sad sad news about Kidd Kraddick is shocking. He will be missed greatly."

Richie Tomblin, described as the head golf professional at the Timberlane Country Club in Gretna on its website, told AP that Kraddick wasn't looking well when he saw him getting ready for Saturday's charity event.

"He came out and he borrowed my golf clubs and went out to the driving range," Tomblin told AP when contacted by phone. "It's kind of a freaky situation. He came out. He practiced a little bit. He hit the ball at the first tee and wasn't feeling good and after that I didn't see him."

Tomblin said the hundreds of amateur golfers taking part went ahead with the event Saturday. He added he only found out afterward that Kraddick had died and he was still shaken about it.

"I'm still trying to figure it out. I really don't know what happened. Everyone keeps texting me asking, 'What's going on?' I really don't know," said Tomblin.

He added he was reluctant to even touch the set of clubs Kraddick had borrowed Saturday for his practice swings.

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Co-founder of Russia's biggest search engine dies

MOSCOW — Ilya Segalovich, the co-founder of Russia's largest search engine, Yandex, has died, the company said Sunday. He was 48.

Segalovich died Saturday at a London hospital, Yandex director general and fellow founder Arkady Volozh said.

Volozh said in the company's blog that Segalovich was diagnosed with stomach cancer last year. He responded positively to chemical therapy, but then developed a brain cancer that caused his death.

On Thursday, Yandex announced Segalovich had died but then corrected itself within hours, saying he was on life support with no brain function. Volozh said doctors removed the life support after it became clear Segalovich couldn't be saved.

"The only hope we had was a diagnosis error," Volozh said. "We couldn't make a miracle. We only could offer a chance for it to happen."

Segalovich's body will be brought home Wednesday, Volozh said. Funeral plans have yet to be announced.

Segalovich founded Yandex in 1997 with Volozh, his school friend. The company has been a Russian success story, with a share of 62 percent of the search engine market in Russia compared with Google's 25.6 percent.

Segalovich invented the engine's name, derived from Yet Another Index, and served as its chief technological officer.

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Russian cargo ship docks with space station

MOSCOW — Russia's space agency says that its cargo ship has docked successfully with the International Space Station.

Roscosmos says the unmanned Progress M-20M spacecraft moored at the station Sunday about six hours after its launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The docking was performed in automatic mode.

The agency says the ship has delivered about 2.4 metric tons of supplies to the space outpost, including fuel, food, water and scientific equipment.

The 2011 retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet has left Russia's Soyuz spacecraft as the sole means to ferry crews to and from the space outpost. The unmanned cargo version of the Soyuz, the Progress, delivers the bulk of station supplies.

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New fruit fly could hurt Maine wild-blueberry crop

PORTLAND, Maine — Maine's wild-blueberry growers are monitoring their fields for a harmful new fruit fly that arrived in the United States five years ago and poses a threat to the state's crop.

With the blueberry harvest kicking into gear later this week, growers have been watching out for the tiny spotted wing drosophila, a native of Asia that caught some growers off-guard when it first appeared in Maine's blueberry fields last summer. Growers will learn how pervasive and widespread it is as the berries ripen in the coming weeks.

The fly poses a threat because it lays its eggs in soft fruit as it ripens, damaging the fruit and making it unfit for market.

"We've had different insects you've had to control, but we haven't had one that does all its dirty work right when you're about to harvest," said Ed Flanagan, president and CEO of Jasper Wyman & Son, a wild-blueberry company based in Milbridge. "We're planning to win, but if the insect wins, we'll have a reduced yield in our fields and we won't have as much grade-A fruit."

This is the time of year when mechanical harvesters and hand-pickers take to Maine's 60,000 acres of wild-blueberry fields to harvest the sweet berries, 99 percent of which is sold as an ingredient for muffins, yogurt, jam and other food products.

Wild blueberries are native to North America and grow naturally in Maine and eastern Canada, the only places that grow them for commercial sale. Wild blueberries are different than cultivated berries, which are larger, grow on high bushes and are commercially grown in about a dozen states and British Columbia.

This year's harvest is projected to be about average at 86 million pounds or so, down from last year's 91 million pounds, the second-largest crop on record.

The quality of this year's crop appears to be good, and prices could be strong because the harvest in Quebec is expected to be down after frost and disease, said David Yarborough, blueberry specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

But it's the spotted wing drosophila that is the biggest concern for now. A native to China, the fly was accidentally introduced in California in 2008 and has since spread across the country, damaging fruit crops in multiple states along the way.

For the past several weeks, Maine blueberry growers have been hanging thousands of fly traps on stakes or trees on the edges of their fields. The traps are nothing more than 16-ounce plastic cups filled with a sugar-and-yeast solution designed to attract and catch the flies to monitor their numbers.

If the flies show up in large numbers, the growers will have to spray insecticides on their blueberry bushes. So far, small numbers have been found in some fields in the state's midcoast area but not enough to warrant treatment.

Still, the flies are expected to increase in number as the monthlong harvest progresses. While growers are anxious about the flies, they're also doing what they can to monitor and control them, Yarborough said.

"It's not a disaster in the sense we know it's here, we're looking for it and we can address it," Yarborough said. "But it does mean it's more work to monitor and more spraying, which nobody wants. But that's the reality of it. If we want a crop, we have to protect the fruit."

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Treasury's Lew: Congress needs to pass debt limit

WASHINGTON — Congress needs to raise the debt limit and take away the "cloud of uncertainty" about the nation's ability to pay its bills, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

"The fight over the debt limit in 2011 hurt the economy, even though, in the end, we saw an extension of the debt limit. We saw confidence fall, and it hurt the economy. Congress needs to do its job. It needs to finish its work on appropriation bills. It needs to pass a debt limit," Lew said on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill are trying to come up with must-do legislation to keep federal agencies running after Sept. 30 and prevent the possibility of a government shutdown. At issue is what is normally routine: a plug-the-gap measure to fund the government for a few weeks or months until a deal can be worked out on appropriations bills giving agencies their operating budgets for the full 2014 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

However, some Democrats don't want to vote to continue to fund the government at new, lower levels mandated by the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration. And some conservatives are making a last stand against President Barack Obama's new health care law. In addition, Senate Democrats are resistant to a $20 billion spending cut wanted by many Republicans.

Lew maintains that the president won't negotiate over the debt limit.

"The mere fact of negotiating over the debt limit, after 2011, would introduce this notion that somehow there's a question about whether or not we're going to pay our bills, whether or not we're going to protect the full faith and credit of the United States," Lew said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." ''Well, it's not OK to default. Congress can't let us default."

"(Congress) has to stop looking for what's the last possible moment," Lew told "Fox News Sunday." ''They should get back after they take their time off in August and they should finish their work and get it done so that there's no uncertainty about America's ability to pay its bills."

Separately, Lew said no federal bailout is in the works for the city of Detroit, which recently filed for bankruptcy protection. Pressed as to why the government chose to bail out big banks, the auto industry and others, but isn't assisting the city, Lew said on CNN's "State of the Union" that the government has been giving Detroit technical advice and has made resources available to help take down blighted properties through federal programs.

But Lew said that the situation in 2009-2010 that warranted the other bailouts was "unique," and that the current problems that Detroit has with its creditors, "it's going to have to work out with its creditors."

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