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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (May 21, 2016)
OFF PAGE ONE Saturday, May 21, 2016 WATER: Saylor has farmed off and on along Butter Creek for 46 years Continued from 1A tures across the state in April, which nearly doubled the rate of snowmelt at a number of monitoring sites. Some sites lost 4 feet of snow in just one month, and two-thirds were completely dry by May — including Arbuckle Mountain and Madison Butte in Morrow County. Butter Creek has no artiicial storage or reser- voirs, which compounds the challenge for growers. The creek routinely runs dry by the middle of summer, which means farms must irrigate in spring when the lows are high. The area was also declared a critical groundwater area in 1986, which prevents digging any new wells. Saylor’s farm is one of the last along Butter Creek before it drains into the Umatilla River near Herm- iston. Though he has a senior water right, Saylor prefers to use lood irrigation on his alfalfa. In order to build up the volume he needs for lood irrigation, he chooses to accumulate his water allocation through the local Watermaster’s Ofice, using a greater amount of water over a shorter period of time. This year, he said Butter Creek simply ran too low, too fast. “It just kept dropping,” he said. “Everything looked really good until you get into March, and then April was much warmer than normal and much drier than normal.” Curtis Cooley, assistant watermaster for Umatilla County, is in charge of monitoring lows on Butter Creek for approximately 20 different users. Once the demand for water exceeds supply, he switches over to an accumulation rotation for farms located below where the creek intersects Highway 207. Accumulation ends after the creek drops below 10 cubic feet per second for more than three consecutive days, and whatever’s left gets used up until it’s gone. “It really varies based on the water year we’ve had,” Cooley said. Since there was more rain and snow to ill Butter Creek early in the year, Cooley said they didn’t have to start the accumulation rotation until April 5. Compare that to early February a year ago, as severe drought began to take hold of much of Eastern Oregon. But the water has disap- peared much more quickly out of Butter Creek in 2016, with accumulation ending on May 11. The rotation didn’t end until June 1 in 2015, and not until July 25 during the more plentiful water year of 2012. “I would say it was a little better than last year, though low has dropped dramati- cally over the last month,” Cooley said. Saylor, who has farmed off and on along Butter Creek for 46 years and serves on the Umatilla Basin Watershed Council, said he’s noticed a recent change in weather patterns, with milder winters and earlier snowmelt compared to the 30-year averages. As for now, he said he’s counting on late season rains to save his wheat crop. “Water is the magic ingre- dient that makes everything work,” he said. Cooley isn’t certain whether the change consti- tutes a new normal along Butter Creek, but said the Water Resources Department encourages growers to irrigate early when they can, before they switch over to accumulation. “With the creek dropping off as quick as it did (this year), the lows just weren’t there,” he said. “When the water shows up earlier in the year, we recommend they use that,” ——— Contact George Plaven at gplaven@eastoregonian.com or 541-966-0825. Chinese government-backed social media users flood Web BEIJING (AP) — China’s government fabricates and posts several hundred million social media posts a year to inluence public opinion about the country, according to a new paper by U.S. researchers examining one of the most opaque aspects of the Communist Party’s rule. The academic study led by Harvard political scientist Gary King claims to be one of the irst in-depth looks into the inner workings of China’s push to inluence public opinion by looding social media with posts portrayed as if they were coming from ordinary people. Aside from possessing highly sophisticated censorship controls to ind and delete content outright, China’s government has long been known to employ a huge group of internet workers, known colloquially as the “Fifty Cent Party,” to inluence discourse in subtler ways. The name originates from a popular rumor — never substantiated — that such people are paid 50 cents per pro-government post. The research project, which took advantage of a trove of government emails, spreadsheets and work reports from a propaganda ofice in central China leaked online in 2014, concludes that an estimated 488 million fake posts a year “enables the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.” The researchers also reached a slightly surprising conclusion about the goal of the massive operation: to “distract the public” during AP Photo/Ng Han Guan A man uses his mobile phone near a red star along a retail shop in Beijing Friday. politically sensitive news events. That counters the widespread perception that Beijing employs internet workers to shout down its critics on online forums. “They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders, and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely,” the paper’s authors write. “Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back up.” The paper detailed an elaborate methodology used by the research team, which employed its own army of research assistants. After gaining a glimpse into how China’s “Fifty Cent” operation organizes itself from leaked documents, the research group created numerous fake accounts of their own to ask large samples of suspected government workers an elaborate set of questions to conirm that the posters were indeed getting guidance from authorities. One of the three co-au- thors, Margaret Roberts from the University of California, San Diego, said in an email that examining leaked docu- ments or interviewing former participants could offer a biased view of the operation, but “large-scale statistical analyses of online data allow us to directly observe and summarize what people within the system are doing.” The trio of political scien- tists, which also included Stanford University’s Jennifer Pan, has been using statistical methods for years to study China’s methods of information control, some- times reaching somewhat unexpected conclusions. In a 2014 study sifting through social media posts, they found that Chinese censors allowed netizens a signiicant amount of freedom to vent their frustrations with the government — until any calls for organized action that could lead to street protests appeared. Those were swiftly taken down. 8th Annual Return to the River Salmon Festival Saturday, May 21, 2016 • 10am – 1pm At Walla Walla Community College by the ball fields on Tausick Way 1 0am - 1pm: Interactive Exhibit Booths Wildlife Cartoon Drawnings First Foods & Medicinal Plant Display 11:30am: Chinook Salmon Release 11am - 1pm: Wine Country Culinary Institute Food Truc k Sockeye Salmon Tacos, Salmon Chowder, Titus Creek Burger, Mediterranean Chicken Gyro, Garlic Fries (Prices rang from $5 - $9) Children's Hot Dog Lunch Available 12pm - 1pm: Tribal Dance Performance Presented by Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Walla Walla Community Colleges Water and Environmental Center. For info visit www.watereducationcenter.org East Oregonian Page 9A DRONES: 450,000 hobbyists have registered at least one drone Continued from 1A drone makers, Amazon and other technology companies and retailers, and privacy advocates. The suggestions are aimed at both commer- cial and private drone users. Among the many recom- mendations: • Operators shouldn’t ly their drones over private property without the owner’s consent. • They should alert people in the area ahead of time when it is practical and explain the purpose of the drone light. • Unless there is “a compelling need,” operators shouldn’t ly a drone where someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a drone should not be used to follow someone continu- ously. • Don’t use information gathered by drones for deci- sions about employment, credit or eligibility for health care. • Don’t use personal information for marketing purposes without the indi- vidual’s consent. • Information from drones shouldn’t be held longer than “reasonably necessary,” although exceptions can be made for legal disputes, safety reasons or with permission of the person being watched. There are about 5,600 drones registered for commercial purposes and about 450,000 hobbyists have registered at least one drone, according to igures from the Federal Aviation Administration. Their popu- larity has soared over the past year or so, putting pressure on the industry and privacy advocates to agree on guide- lines governing their use. The Consumer Tech- nology Association, a corpo- rate group whose members include Google, Apple and Microsoft, said this week’s AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File In this April 14 photo, a drone captures videos and still images of an apartment building in Philadelphia. guidelines balance innova- tion and privacy. The group’s director of regulatory affairs, Alex Reynolds, said that more “prescriptive rules” would threaten the beneits offered by drones, from delivering disaster relief to helping agriculture and infrastructure maintenance. The Center for Democ- racy and Technology, a civil liberties group, said it hoped big companies and hobbyists alike would follow the guidelines. “We’re concerned about the widespread use of drones for surveillance without any rules,” said Chris Calabrese, the group’s vice president of policy. He said the group got all the important protections it wanted in the guidelines, including protection against persistent surveillance even in public places and use of drone-gathered data in employment and marketing. News outlets including The Associated Press were represented in the discussions leading up to the guidelines and won an exemption. The standards say news organi- zations should be able to use drones the same way they use comparable technology — such as planes and helicopters — to record data in public spaces as long as they follow their own ethics policies and federal and state laws. Joel Roberson, an attorney who represented the news groups, said the outcome “will ensure that news-reporting organiza- tions have a First Amend- ment right to gather the news through drones in the national airspace.” There were some hold- outs to the inal report. Four companies including GoPro, whose cameras are mounted on many drones, and drone maker DJI refused to sign the guidelines. Kara Calvert, a spokeswoman for the companies, said there are no such guidelines for secu- rity cameras or camera-toting people on ladders or rooftops. Drone users shouldn’t face tougher rules, she said. The American Civil Liberties Union objected to qualiiers that suggest drone operators can sometimes ignore the guidelines if they have a “compelling need” or “implied” consent of individuals. “What does that mean?” said Jay Stanley, a privacy analyst with ACLU. “That kind of weasel language runs throughout the document.” The Federal Aviation Administration is close to issuing inal rules regarding drones, but those regulations are expected to stick to safety issues, not privacy. Airline pilots have reported seeing drones lying dangerously close to their planes.