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.