2 The RAPS Sheet May 2020 CO-PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE RAPS’ online vote another way to keep safe and healthy WE ARE LIVING THROUGH historically difficult times. We need to look back more than 100 years to learn from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That “Spanish flu” was a challenge to world health similar to our COVID-19 situation. We need to recall the Great Depression in the United States to see a shock to our economy similar to what we are dealing with now. One aspect of our current situation is worse than the Depression: unemployment spiking rapidly. Shutting down the economy has cost roughly 10 years of job growth to disappear. For weeks now Oregon has been under stay-at-home orders, allowing only essential work to continue in person at work sites. Evidence suggests we have been able to “flatten the curve” of new cases. Good job, Oregon! Oregonians’ self-sacrifice allowed our health care system to have plenty of surplus capacity. Governor Kate Brown even sent “extra” ventilators to help New York state deal with its overwhelmed health care system. PSU has shut down all but essential activity on campus. Most employees are working remotely. Your RAPS Board has cancelled or postponed all in-person events scheduled for the spring of 2020. Our office manager, Emily Caparelli, has been working from home and doing a great job. The Board has moved into the new “keep our distance” world pretty well. We have become competent enough with online technology to hold group meetings with Zoom. The Book Group is experimenting with using Zoom for its monthly get-togethers. RAPS will hold elections for the Board this spring. The Board decided to keep our office manager safe by not using paper ballots this year. We instead will vote electronically, using an online survey hosted by PSU. When the email containing candidate photographs and biographies comes to you, please review the information. Make your choices. And vote electronically, by following the link in the email announcing the election. Emily can stay safe at home, with no need to be in the office to mail out and handle returned paper ballots this year. I hope you and your loved ones continue to keep your physical separation from others. Stay healthy. We will get through these tough times; RAPS will once again have events like our monthly programs and club activities. We may have to keep some distance, and even wear masks, but we will be together again. —Steve Brennan such major events as the Missoula Floods and major forest fires have been shaping the geology of the Columbia Gorge over thousands of years. The event employed the Facebook OMSI platform, and was presented using Zoom, which is now being used to deliver PSU classes. Burns reported that prior to the presentation, the event had received 2,000 “likes” and that the estimated attendance for the event was more than 5,000 participants from all over the United States. By the next day the virtual OMSI Science Pub went viral, and more than 34,000 people had downloaded the event. Asked why the OMSI event was so compelling, Burns Burns hosts OMSI’s first Science Pub presentation . . . From page 1 said that people of the Pacific Northwest love the outdoors. “We take our visitors to the Gorge and other places with great natural beauty,” he said. “People just love knowing why these amazing places like Beacon Rock and Multnomah Falls formed and how they change.” You can view Burns’s virtual Science Pub at: https://www.facebook.com/9903008738/videos/216697786 210412/ —Eileen Brennan The Board decided to keep our office manager safe by not using paper ballots this year. Learn about upcoming Scott Burns talks on page 5.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz