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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Authorities have arrested a man who they say is a person of interest in the August disappearance of a Lucerne resident.
The Lake County Sheriff’s Office said Nova Maye Deperno, 26, a Lake County resident, was arrested in Occidental in Sonoma County on Thursday evening.
He’s believed to be connected to the disappearance of Ronald James Meluso.
Meluso, 63, was reported as missing to the sheriff’s office on Aug. 22, four days after he was last heard from, authorities said.
Meluso is believed to be a victim of foul play, the sheriff’s office said.
Authorities were seeking Deperno for assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism and brandishing a firearm, and he was considered armed and dangerous.
At 5 p.m. Thursday the Lake County Sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit Detectives developed information that led to the location of Nova Deperno at a residence in the 14000 block of Occidental Road.
The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office SWAT team assisted the Lake County Sheriff's Office with taking Deperno into custody.
Deperno fled from the residence, and after a two-hour search, he was found by the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office helicopter, Henry-1, hiding under a tree canopy, officials said.
Deperno was booked into the Sonoma County Jail where he’s being held on $635,000 bail.
Jail records said he is due to appear in court in Sonoma County on Tuesday afternoon.
The investigation is ongoing. Anyone who has information regarding Meluso’s whereabouts to contact Det. Jeff Mora of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office at 707-262-4224 or by email at
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Bond comes to Lake County after working at First 5 Mendocino County for nearly five years as the public relations manager.
“I truly believe that the work First 5’s across the state do has immense positive impact for families with young children and am humbled to be able to continue this great work here in Lake County. If we as a community can set our families up for success, then we are truly succeeding as a community,” said Bond.
“While I am not new to the First 5 world and work, I am new to the work being done here in Lake County,” Bond said. “I am excited to see the progress that has already been made and look forward to collaborating with partners and our community in the days ahead for the good of young children and families.”
Bond holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California, Davis, and has previous experience working in group homes for children with severe mental and behavioral health disabilities. She also has worked as an education supervisor for Six Flags Discovery Kingdom.
“My experience at the group home showed a light on the negative impacts of adverse childhood experiences, while my work at Six Flags highlighted the other side of the spectrum where positive, enriching experiences abounded,” Bond said. “We need to remember and consider that children and families come from all walks of life, and it is our responsibility to provide them with the resources necessary and to meet them where they are at. First 5’s upstream work helps prevent or at least provide a path of hope in the face of adversity, and is critical to this balance.”
More information about First 5 Lake, its investments and priorities can be found at www.firstfivelake.org.
Using funds derived from California Proposition 10’s voter-mandated tax on tobacco products, the First 5 Lake County Commission funds programs and services that benefit the health and development of young children and educate parents, grandparents, caregivers and teachers about the critical role they play during a child’s first five years.
Since its inception in 2000, First 5 Lake has supported thousands of families with programs and services designed to help Lake County children grow up healthy and ready to succeed in school and life.
The First 5 Lake commissioners are:
• Chair: Tina Scott, Lake County District 4 supervisor.
• Vice Chair: Carly Swatosh-Sherman, Lake County Office of Education, education specialist.
• Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg.
• Lake County Social Services Director Crystal Markytan.
• Lake County Health Services Director Jonathan Portney.
• Allison Panella, mother of children under age 5.
• Fawn Rave, education director, Robinson Rancheria.
• Tarin Benson, coordinator of Student Services for Konocti Unified School District.
• Justin Gaddy, father of a child under age 5.
Administration of a decedent’s estate may involve investment accounts (with stocks and bonds) held in the decedent’s name or trust.
The investment accounts may be at a bank or a brokerage. A person administering a probate (i.e a personal representative) or trust estate (i.e., a successor trustee) will want to (1) obtain information regarding decedent’s account; (2) retitle decedent’s account; (3) close decedent’s account; and (4) liquidate or transfer assets in-kind.
Such work may involve the so-called “back office” of a bank or brokerage; if the decedent’s accounts were held by a financial adviser, however, the financial adviser is the “go to” person for dealing with the company back office.
The first step is to contact the correct back office department involved with handling a decedent’s account, sometimes called, “the estates department.” The customer service number and email can be found on a financial statement but also by searching online.
Unfortunately calls too often involve long on-hold waiting periods, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays.
The purpose of the initial call is to introduce oneself, to advise that the account holder is deceased, and to ask about the company’s procedures for transferring the account (i.e., what documents are required in order to gain control over the account, and how to provide them).
The bank or brokerage will then assign a case reference number to be used on all future communications.
Sometimes a specific representative may be assigned. If a specific representative is assigned you will want that person’s telephone and email.
If no employee is assigned then you will need to communicate with the correct back-office department and will need to communicate every time a document is submitted to request someone to process the documents. Otherwise, the documents may simply go ignored without you knowing this is even happening.
Some of the necessary documentation is either produced or in the possession of the attorney who is assisting with administering the estate. That is, the account holder’s certified death certificate, the client’s fiduciary authority over the account (e.g., court certified letters of administration or a trustee’s certification of trust), and a letter of authorization signed by the client to allow the bank or brokerage company to communicate with the attorney and staff.
Other blank document forms are provided by the bank or brokerage for completion and signature. This includes a new brokerage account application and certain additional disclosure documents.
After reading the company’s application and supporting documents, questions may arise regarding how to complete the forms, how to submit the forms, and how to follow up on the processing. This communication can sometimes be accomplished by email or online chat (website) with a representative.
Next is returning the signed and completed documents. Certain documents — such as the certified death certificate — must be returned by USPS (mail) or courier delivery.
Other documents can be sent by scan and email, facsimile, or through a secure electronic portal. Confirmation that the documents are received should be obtained.
After submission, a long period of waiting occurs. Follow up by email avoids being kept on hold. Often emails are not answered for days, however, and so require follow-up emails or a telephone call to get a reply.
Typically the first review of the documents results in a request for further redoing the documents to correct errors and in a request for additional documents.
The foregoing drawn out and tedious process is usually done by an attorney or a financial adviser, or both, working with the financial company’s back office.
The foregoing is not legal advice. Consult an attorney if confronting these issues.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at
New years often come with new resolutions. Get back in shape. Read more. Make more time for friends and family. My list of resolutions might not look quite the same as yours, but each of our resolutions represents a plan for something new, or at least a little bit different. As you craft your 2022 resolutions, I hope that you will add one that is also on my list: feel more flow.
Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s research on flow started in the 1970s. He has called it the “secret to happiness.” Flow is a state of “optimal experience” that each of us can incorporate into our everyday lives. One characterized by immense joy that makes a life worth living.
In the years since, researchers have gained a vast store of knowledge about what it is like to be in flow and how experiencing it is important for our overall mental health and well-being. In short, we are completely absorbed in a highly rewarding activity – and not in our inner monologues – when we feel flow.
I am an assistant professor of communication and cognitive science, and I have been studying flow for the last 10 years. My research lab investigates what is happening in our brains when people experience flow. Our goal is to better understand how the experience happens and to make it easier for people to feel flow and its benefits.
What it is like to be in flow?
People often say flow is like “being in the zone.” Psychologists Jeanne Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi describe it as something more. When people feel flow, they are in a state of intense concentration. Their thoughts are focused on an experience rather than on themselves. They lose a sense of time and feel as if there is a merging of their actions and their awareness. That they have control over the situation. That the experience is not physically or mentally taxing.
Most importantly, flow is what researchers call an autotelic experience. Autotelic derives from two Greek words: autos (self) and telos (end or goal). Autotelic experiences are things that are worth doing in and of themselves. Researchers sometimes call these intrinsically rewarding experiences. Flow experiences are intrinsically rewarding.
What causes flow?
Flow occurs when a task’s challenge is balanced with one’s skill. In fact, both the task challenge and skill level have to be high. I often tell my students that they will not feel flow when they are doing the dishes. Most people are highly skilled dishwashers, and washing dishes is not a very challenging task.
So when do people experience flow? Csíkszentmihályi’s research in the 1970s focused on people doing tasks they enjoyed. He studied swimmers, music composers, chess players, dancers, mountain climbers and other athletes. He went on to study how people can find flow in more everyday experiences. I am an avid snowboarder, and I regularly feel flow on the mountain. Other people feel it by practicing yoga – not me, unfortunately! – by riding their bike, cooking or going for a run. So long as that task’s challenge is high, and so are your skills, you should be able to achieve flow.
Researchers also know that people can experience flow by using interactive media, like playing a video game. In fact, Csíkszentmihályi said that “games are obvious flow activities, and play is the flow experience par excellence.” Video game developers are very familiar with the idea, and they think hard about how to design games so that players feel flow.
Why is it good to feel flow?
Earlier I said that Csíkszentmihályi called flow “the secret to happiness.” Why is that? For one thing, the experience can help people pursue their long-term goals. This is because research shows that taking a break to do something fun can help enhance one’s self-control, goal pursuit and well-being.
So next time you are feeling like a guilty couch potato for playing a video game, remind yourself that you are actually doing something that can help set you up for long-term success and well-being. Importantly, quality – and not necessarily quantity – matters. Research shows that spending a lot of time playing video games only has a very small influence on your overall well-being. Focus on finding games that help you feel flow, rather than on spending more time playing games.
A recent study also shows that flow helps people stay resilient in the face of adversity. Part of this is because flow can help refocus thoughts away from something stressful to something enjoyable. In fact, studies have shown that experiencing flow can help guard against depression and burnout.
Research also shows that people who experienced stronger feelings of flow had better well-being during the COVID-19 quarantine compared to people who had weaker experiences. This might be because feeling flow helped distract them from worrying.
What is your brain doing during flow?
Researchers have been studying flow for nearly 50 years, but only recently have they begun to decipher what is going on in the brain during flow. One of my colleagues, media neuroscientist René Weber, has proposed that flow is associated with a specific brain-network configuration.
Supporting Weber’s hypothesis, studies show that the experience is associated with activity in brain structures implicated in feeling reward and pursuing our goals. This may be one reason why flow feels so enjoyable and why people are so focused on tasks that make them feel flow. Research also shows that flow is associated with decreased activity in brain structures implicated in self-focus. This may help explain why feeling flow can help distract people from worry.
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Weber, Jacob Fisher and I have developed a video game called Asteroid Impact to help us better study flow. In my own research, I have participants play Asteroid Impact while having their brain scanned. My work has shown that flow is associated with a specific brain network configuration that has low energy requirements. This may help explain why we do not experience flow as being physically or mentally demanding. I have also shown that, instead of maintaining one stable network configuration, the brain actually changes its network configuration during flow. This is important because rapid brain network reconfiguration helps people adapt to difficult tasks.
What more can the brain tell us?
Right now, researchers do not know how brain responses associated with flow contribute to well-being. With very few exceptions, there is almost no research on how brain responses actually cause flow. Every neuroscience study I described earlier was correlational, not causal. Said differently, we can conclude that these brain responses are associated with flow. We cannot conclude that these brain responses cause flow.
Researchers think the connection between flow and well-being has something to do with three things: suppressing brain activation in structures associated with thinking about ourselves, dampening activation in structures associated with negative thoughts, and increasing activation in reward-processing regions.
I’d argue that testing this hypothesis is vital. Medical professionals have started to use video games in clinical applications to help treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Maybe one day a clinician will be able to help prescribe a Food and Drug Adminstration-approved video game to help bolster someone’s resilience or help them fight off depression.
That is probably several years into the future, if it is even possible at all. Right now, I hope that you will resolve to find more flow in your everyday life. You may find that this helps you achieve your other resolutions, too.
Richard Huskey, Assistant Professor of Communication and Cognitive Science, University of California, Davis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest on record, according to independent analyses done by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2021 were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.85 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS in New York.
NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to see how global temperature changes over time.
Collectively, the past eight years are the warmest years since modern record keeping began in 1880. This annual temperature data makes up the global temperature record — which tells scientists the planet is warming.
According to NASA’s temperature record, Earth in 2021 was about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average, the start of the industrial revolution.
“Science leaves no room for doubt: Climate change is the existential threat of our time,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Eight of the top 10 warmest years on our planet occurred in the last decade, an indisputable fact that underscores the need for bold action to safeguard the future of our country — and all of humanity. NASA’s scientific research about how Earth is changing and getting warmer will guide communities throughout the world, helping humanity confront climate and mitigate its devastating effects.”
This warming trend around the globe is due to human activities that have increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
The planet is already seeing the effects of global warming: Arctic sea ice is declining, sea levels are rising, wildfires are becoming more severe and animal migration patterns are shifting.
Understanding how the planet is changing — and how rapidly that change occurs — is crucial for humanity to prepare for and adapt to a warmer world.
Weather stations, ships, and ocean buoys around the globe record the temperature at Earth’s surface throughout the year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are validated with satellite data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, or AIRS, on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
Scientists analyze these measurements using computer algorithms to deal with uncertainties in the data and quality control to calculate the global average surface temperature difference for every year.
NASA compares that global mean temperature to its baseline period of 1951-1980. That baseline includes climate patterns and unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring that it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.
Many factors affect the average temperature any given year, such as La Nina and El Nino climate patterns in the tropical Pacific. For example, 2021 was a La Nina year and NASA scientists estimate that it may have cooled global temperatures by about 0.06 degrees Fahrenheit (0.03 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been.
A separate, independent analysis by NOAA also concluded that the global surface temperature for 2021 was the sixth highest since record keeping began in 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology.
“The complexity of the various analyses doesn’t matter because the signals are so strong,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling and climate change research. “The trends are all the same because the trends are so large.”
NASA’s full data set of global surface temperatures for 2021, as well as details of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS.
GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.
For more information about NASA’s Earth science missions, visit https://www.nasa.gov/earth.
LAKEPORT, Calif. — As it prepares for construction on its Lakefront Park to begin later this year, the city of Lakeport has announced new feature at the site.
The city said it has completed a new pedestrian bridge linking the Library Park parklands and the site of the future Lakefront Park along the Clear Lake shoreline. The park is located at 800 N. Main St.
The new pedestrian bridge is the first public improvement related to the new Lakefront Park slated to begin construction later this year.
The Lakefront Park project is being funded by a $5.9 million grant from the 2018 State of California Parks and Water Bond (Proposition 68).
The grant funded the acquisition of the 5.5-acre site and the development of a shoreline community park.
Park features will include a promenade lakefront walking path, basketball court, ninja gym, amphitheater, splash pad, skate park, multiuse lawn area, public parking, sheltered picnic area, restrooms and a concession building.
The new bridge, located on the north side of the Fifth Street public parking lot and extending across a seasonal stormwater drainage course, is now open for use.
The prefabricated bridge design was selected by Lakeport Public Works staff and was chosen for its rustic appearance which ties into the design theme of Library Park and the future Lakefront Park.
The bridge’s decorative stamped concrete walking surface accentuates the design and makes an attractive addition to the city’s park system.
Lakeport Public Works Department staff constructed the concrete and steel bridge footings, installed the bridge upon delivery and completed most of the finished concrete work.
City officials said they are very proud of the staff's collective efforts on the bridge project.
