For the next week, fireworks will be the primary natural vegetation ignition source. The Kennewick Fire Department would like to remind our community that the discharge and possession of consumer fireworks is banned within the city limits of Kennewick. The criminal penalty for violating this ban is a misdemeanor. The maximum penalty is a $1,000 fine and up to 90 days in jail.

Residents are encouraged to refrain from using personal fireworks and to attend one of the safe, family-oriented, local public fireworks displays such as the Annual River of Fire Festival in Columbia Park on the 4th of July.

With very hot weather predicted, and the dry vegetation caused by current conditions, it is imperative that individuals exercise extra caution while working with equipment around dry grasses, and to avoid driving over or extremely close to dried vegetation.

Additionally, during these types of conditions, both people and animals can be at risk of smoke-related respiratory illness and heat-related injuries. Recent wildland fires in our State demonstrate the need for exercising extreme caution this summer season.
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Individuals may contact their local fire department if they have questions.

Petersen Hastings is pleased to announce it has been named to the 2018 edition of the Financial Times (FT) 300 Top Registered Investment Advisers (RIA). The list recognizes top independent RIA firms from across the United States. Petersen Hastings is one of eight RIA firms recognized from the State of Washington, and the only RIA located in Eastern Washington.
This is the fifth annual FT 300 list, produced independently by the Financial Times in collaboration with Ignites Research, a subsidiary of the FT that provides business intelligence on the asset management industry.

RIA firms applied for consideration, having met a minimum set of criteria. Applicants were then graded on six factors: assets under management (AUM); AUM growth rate; years in existence; advanced industry credentials of the firm’s advisers; online accessibility; and compliance records. There are no fees or other considerations required of RIAs that apply for the FT 300.

The FT 300 is one in series of rankings of top advisers by the Financial Times, including the FT 401 (DC retirement plan advisers) and the FT 400 (broker-dealer advisers).
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Petersen Hastings is a Registered Investment Advisor located in Kennewick, WA. As a primary fiduciary, Petersen Hastings serves committed investors with complex financial needs. Our multigenerational team of experienced and credentialed professionals delivers innovative solutions through The Trusted Financial PathTM to enhance and preserve wealth.
 
For additional information, contact Scott Sarber at 509.735.0484 or [email protected].

The HAPO Community Credit Union River of Fire will once again light up the Columbia River in celebration of Independence Day on July 4th, but spectators can expect a few changes in Columbia Park.

The event, formerly managed by the Tri-Cities Regional Chamber of Commerce, has been picked up by the Tri-City Water Follies so families can continue to enjoy the decades-long tradition.

Columbia Park will open at 9a for the fireworks show parking. A Family Fun Golf Tournament at the Columbia Park Golf Course kicks off the fun with a shotgun start at 9a. Food vendors and kids activities will be available at the east end of the park beginning at noon. The J&S Dreamland Express will be running throughout the day thanks to BNSF Railway.

Other events include Country Band Chris Loid and Green Light Polly and Stingray on stage beginning at 3p. A beer garden will be open across from the bleachers from 3p to 9:30p.

“The expanded fireworks extravaganza will feature the ultimate performance package with more light and power than ever before” Kathy Powell, Tri City Water Follies Event Director said. “Bigger, bolder, brighter truly epitomizes this years’ experience!” Spectators are encouraged to bring their favorite music device as the fireworks display will be synchronized to patriotic music being broadcast on KORD, 97 Rock, 98.3 The Key, KFLD & Hot 97.5.

Instead of using a barge anchored in the Columbia River west of the Blue Bridge, the fireworks will be launched from the Neil F Lampson pit area at the east end of Columbia Park. When organizers learned the barge couldn’t be used for the show, the fireworks company coordinated with supporting agencies to establish a site in which no people or cars will be allowed. As a result, vehicles entering from the east will be directed around the south side of the pond to parking areas. Spectators are encouraged to come early as part of the viewing area previously available will be closed. Parking is allowed only in designated areas.

A $5 per car donation is requested to help the non-profit Tri-City Water Follies Association cover expenses.

For more information about the HAPO Community Credit Union River of Fire Celebration, log on to www.waterfollies.com.

Fuse SPC and the City of Kennewick in collaboration with the Historic Downtown Kennewick Partnership (HDKP) are partnering to establish a business and community accelerator in Downtown Kennewick to support the city’s economic development priority goal, including entrepreneurship, business expansion and job creation.
 
$40,000 of grant funding will be used to establish a business and community accelerator in Downtown Kennewick and provide educational programming, events, mentoring, access to early stage capital and preparation for businesses to succeed and grow. Many diverse, small businesses are attracted to Downtown Kennewick as a commercial district where they can afford to grow and prosper, creating a demand for a small business startup and accelerator support.
 
A specific location hasn’t been selected yet, however the partnership agreement requires Fuse to be strategically located in the downtown to support revitalization efforts and meet economic development criteria required by grant funding. “Taking the lessons Fuse learned from opening the first location in Richland, through to the relocation to our big, beautiful new space in the Parkway, we know it’s important to first build community before we build a physical location,” says Jess Stangeland, Fuse Manager. “I look forward to working with the city and HDKP to first understand the specific needs around entrepreneurship and community development in downtown Kennewick. From there we can curate all the great educational programing and events that Fuse currently does to fit the demands of that market.”
 
A grant awarded to the city from the Frontier Communications America’s Best Communities contest is helping kick start the accelerator. The remainder of the funding is from interest earnings from an economic development loan that was repaid in full in 2003. The intent of the grant funding is to expand and diversify local industry and create local living wage jobs.
 
“The grant is intended to underwrite the cost of recruiting businesses and marketing to attract entrepreneurs and young companies to a facility located in downtown Kennewick,” Estes-Cross said. The process to get the accelerator established could take up to two years. “The goal is to see at least 10 businesses and 18 new jobs created as a result of the accelerator.”
 
Fuse has a proven track record of providing these services in our region. It has the ability to effectively mentor and connect small businesses with capital investment and the larger entrepreneurial ecosystem. Fuse is a social purpose corporation, made up shareholders who are active members of the Tri-Cities business community.   

  About Fuse SPC
 
Fuse, located in the heart of the Parkway in Richland, is a hub for freelancers, small business, entrepreneurs, community development, and high-impact educational events. Fuse was founded on a belief that development of business and community go hand-in-hand. It is our mission to champion and support innovation, education, and collaboration. Fuse is a business & community accelerator run out of a symbiotic co-working space that facilitates growth for those individuals and companies in the startup phase. Since its foundation in 2014 over 105 companies have launched out of Fuse; we have sponsored and hosted over 500 events, meetups, and programs; and are home to 14 small businesses and 170 members. We encourage a mutually beneficial environment where you can be your most productive. Because Interaction cultivates innovation.
 
Contact:            Jess Stangeland, Manager
 
                           [email protected]
 
Phone:              (509) 572-3340

​Better Business Bureau Northwest + Pacific is proud to welcome Danielle Kane as the Tri-Cities Marketplace Manager. Kane will serve as the media and community contact for Tri-Cities and surrounding areas.  
 
Kane has spent the last five years working in Manhattan and recently moved to the Tri-Cities area. As a New York native, Kane received her degree in journalism from Utica College, New York and has professional experience in print, online media content generation and event planning. As someone who loves socializing and trying new experiences, Kane is excited about her new role as a liaison for BBB to the Tri-Cities community, businesses and media.  
 
“We are pleased to have Danielle join our team to serve the people and businesses in the Tri-Cities area,” Tyler Andrew, CEO, said. “We are excited to see how BBB’s presence grows in the Northwest and Pacific with her experience in media and journalism.”  
 
Kane can be reached at 509-820-9916 or [email protected]. She is available for media interviews, community events and business visits.  

Join us on Friday, June 29th from 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. at the Southridge Sports and Events Complex for Arc of the Tri-Cities Night. Every food vendor is donating 10% of profits to the Arc of Tri-Cities. Donation jars will also be available at every food truck.

In addition to their regular menu, every food vendor offers a $7 dinner special which includes a free carousel ride. This week’s entertainment is the Jack Rothwell and the free kid’s activity is face painting. Event is free to attend. Visit the Sunset at Southridge Facebook page for weekly updates and complete list of food vendors.

Banquet tables and picnic benches are available but in limited quantities so attendees are encouraged to bring their own chairs and blankets. Sunset at Southridge is held every 1st, 3rd and 5th Fridays of the month, June – August. Event is sponsored by Toyota of Tri-Cities and Retter and Company Sotheby's International Realty.
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Southridge Sports and Events Complex is located at 2901 Southridge Blvd.

The Tri-Cities Airport was awarded more than $10 million in grant money from the US Department of Transportation (DOT).  Specifically, the airport received a grant for $757,251 to update its Airport Master Plan and $9,419,121 to relocate Taxiway Alpha.
 
“These funds will allow the airport to provide important safety upgrades as well as properly prepare for the future,” said stated Buck Taft, Director of the Tri-Cities Airport. “The airport is excited to immediately put the grant money to good use investing in the airport and creating local jobs.”
 
The Airport Master Plan is a detailed study that provides a 20-year look at future airport projects.  For Tri-Cities Airport, the plan will be completed by national aviation engineering and planning firm Mead & Hunt. In fact, completion of these recent projects means the airport has concluded the majority of the projects on its current Airport Master Plan more than ten years early. “We developed our latest Master Plan in 2012,” continued Taft. “Thanks to federal funding, an economic upswing and a community committed to using this airport, we were able to complete or have planned all of our major projects.  It’s now time to step back and think about what the next twenty years could bring.”
 
Work on the Taxiway Alpha project should begin in July. The airport will relocate and rehabilitate the taxiway to bring it into line with current FAA design standards. A similar effort was undertaken to relocate Taxiway Delta in 2013. The rehab and relocation of the taxiway is expected to take more than a year, without any impact to the traveling public. J-U-B Engineers will handle the project management, and Inland Asphalt Company will perform the work. Both firms have offices in the Tri-Cities area.

The City of Kennewick will hold a Sustainability Forum at the Three Rivers Convention Center on July 12th, 2018 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. This event is an opportunity for the public to learn about the Sustainability Program put together by City Staff in 2017, which documents how the City and its regional partners implement practices and strategies to proactively make decisions as good stewards of the public and environment. 

This event is free and open to the public. Attendees can expect to learn from community organizations, service providers, government organizations, and City of Kennewick staff about the programs available to and impacting the community. Lightning Talks will be performed every fifteen minutes throughout the day touching on topics from a variety of organizations.

The Sustainability Program, an agenda for the day, and a list of participating organizations may be found at:
www.go2kennewick.com/sustainability.

Contact Miles Thomas at 585-4450 for additional information.

A deep neural network running on an ordinary desktop computer is interpreting highly technical data related to national security as well as — and sometimes better than — today's best automated methods or even human experts.

The progress tackling some of the most complex problems of the environment, the cosmos and national security comes from scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who presented their work at the 11th MARC conference — Methods and Applications of Radioanalytical Chemistry — in April in Hawaii. Their work employs deep learning, in which machines are enabled to learn and make decisions without being explicitly programmed for all conditions.

The research probes incredibly complex data sets from the laboratory's shallow underground lab, where scientists detect the faintest of signals from a planet abuzz in activity. In the laboratory buried 81 feet beneath concrete, rock and earth, thick shielding dampens signals from cosmic rays, electronics and other sources. That allows PNNL scientists to isolate and decipher signals of interest collected from anywhere on the planet.

Those signals signify events called radioactive decays, when a particle such as an electron is emitted from an atom. The process is happening constantly, through both natural and human activity. Scientists can monitor changes in levels of argon-37, which could indicate prior nuclear test activity, and argon-39, whose levels help scientists determine the age of groundwater and learn more about the planet.
 
The lab has accumulated data on millions of radioactive decay events since it opened in 2010. But it's a noisy world out there, especially for scientists listening for very rare signals that are easily confused with signals of a different and frequently routine origin — for instance, a person flipping on a light switch or receiving a call on a cell phone.

PNNL scientist Emily Mace, who presented at MARC, is an expert in interpreting the features of such signals — when an event might indicate underground nuclear testing, for example, or a rapidly depleting aquifer. Much like physicians peruse X-rays for hints of disease, Mace and her colleagues pore over radioactive decay event data regularly to interpret the signals — their energy, timing, peaks, slopes, duration, and other features.

"Some pulse shapes are difficult to interpret," said Mace. "It can be challenging to differentiate between good and bad data."

Recently Mace and colleagues turned for input to their colleagues who are experts in deep learning, an exciting and active subfield of artificial intelligence. Jesse Ward is one of dozens of deep learning experts at the lab who are exploring several applications through PNNL's Deep Learning for Scientific Discovery Agile Investment. Mace sent Ward information on nearly 2 million energy pulses detected in the Shallow Underground Laboratory since 2010.

Ward used a clean sample set of 32,000 pulses to train the network, inputting many features of each pulse and showing the network how the data was interpreted. Then he fed the network thousands more signals as it taught itself to differentiate between "good" signals that showed something of interest and "bad" signals that amounted to unwanted noise. Finally, he tested the network, feeding it increasingly complex sets of data that are difficult even for experts to interpret.

The network he created interprets pulse shape events with an accuracy that equals and sometimes surpasses the know-how of experts like Mace. With straightforward data, the program sorted more than 99.9 percent of the pulses correctly.

Results are even more impressive when the data is noisy and includes an avalanche of spurious signals:

• In an analysis involving 50,000 pulses, the neural network agreed 100 percent of the time with the human expert, besting the best conventional computerized techniques which agreed with the expert 99.8 percent of the time.
• In another analysis of 10,000 pulses, the neural net correctly identified 99.9 percent of pulses compared to 96.1 percent with the conventional technique. Included in this analysis were the toughest pulses to interpret; with that subset, the neural network did more than 25 times better, correctly classifying 386 out of 400 pulses compared to 14 of 400 for the conventional technique.

"This is a relatively simple neural network but the results are impressive," said Ward. "You can do productive work on important scientific problems with a fairly primitive machine. It's exciting to consider what else is possible."

The project posed an unexpected challenge, however: The shallow underground lab is so pristine, with most spurious noise signals mitigated before they enter the data stream, that Ward found himself asking Mace for more bad data.

"Signals can be well behaved or they can be poorly behaved," said Ward. "For the network to learn about the good signals, it needs a decent amount of bad signals for comparison."

The problem of culling through vast amounts of data looking for meaningful signals has a raft of implications and extends to many areas of science. At PNNL, one area is the search for signals that would result from dark matter, the vast portion of matter in our universe whose origin and whereabouts is unknown. Another is the automatic detection of breast cancers and other tissue anomalies.
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"Deep learning is making it easier for us to filter out a small number of good events that are indicative of the activity of interest," said Craig Aalseth, nuclear physicist and PNNL laboratory fellow. "It's great to see deep-learning techniques actually doing a better job than our previous best detection techniques."

The Mid-Columbia Mastersingers is proud to announce the Fall 2018 expansion of its Mastersingers Youth [MY] program, and the 4th Annual Choir Camp for youth in the Tri-Cities area.

The success of the Mid-Columbia Boys’ Choir since its inception in 2014 has propelled its directors to create three new youth choirs for boys and girls in grades 4-12. The existing Boys’ Choir will now be one of four non-auditioned youth choirs in the MY program, adding the Mid-Columbia Girls’ Choir, Mid-Columbia Young Men’s Choir, and Mid-Columbia Young Women’s Choir. The expansion into multiple youth choir groups will allow MY Directors to focus on the unique needs of each group.

In August, MY will host Choir Camp at Columbia Basin College from 8:30-11am from Tue. August 14 through Fri. August 17. Campers will sing the national anthem at Gesa Stadium for the Tri-City Dust Devils game on Saturday, August 18.

The 2018-19 choir season will consist of two 4-month sessions: Sept-Jan and Feb-May. MY is committed to accessibility, and offers an established, need-based financial aid program to ensure than any child who wants to sing in a MY Choir has the opportunity to do so.

Mastersingers Youth is led by Directors JoLyn Glenn and Kurtis McFadden, both choir teachers for Pasco School District, at Chiawana High School and McLoughlin Middle School respectively. Glenn will lead the Mid-Columbia Young Women’s Choir for girls in grades 8-12, while McFadden leads the Mid-Columbia Young Men’s Choir for boys in grades 7-12 whose voices have begun to change. Two newly hired Associate Directors will lead the younger groups; Scott Wagnon, choir teacher at Kamiakan High School, will take over the Mid-Columbia Boys’ Choir. The Mid-Columbia Girls’ Choir will be led by community choir director Marianne Larsen.

Participants will have the opportunity to perform in a wide array of venues, sing a variety of musical styles, and share the stage often with the seasoned musicians of the Mid-Columbia Mastersingers adult choirs as well as other local groups like the Mid-Columbia Symphony and Mid-Columbia Ballet. Students who sing in choir outperform non-arts peers on the SATs and show a 20 percent increase in test scores in both language and math. By singing in choir, students learn to analyze problems, and to solve them in collaboration with colleagues to achieve a common goal.
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Registration for both Choir Camp and the 2018-2019 Choir Season is available at www.MCMastersingers.org.