The Last Newspaper?

I got an annual bill for the Anchorage Daily News a while back.  But I had also just been informed that their new policy was no more door step delivery.  Newspapers on the driveway.  So it now sits very close to the sidewalk where someone walking by could easily pick it up.  (There was a period when someone was actually getting it off our doorstep every morning.)

But I've also grown comfortable being able to open the door on a snowy day and reach out and get the paper.  I don't have to put on shoes to walk through the snow.  The paper has gotten skinnier.  Then we lost Saturday papers.  And now no more doorstep deliveries.

I understand daily newspapers are dying across the country. I want to support my local paper.   But each cutback of this or that content or service is one step too far for one segment or another of the customer base. And those people stop subscribing.  So the cost savings becomes a revenue loss.

Is this my step too far?  They called  Tuesday to let me know my subscription was ending.  So I was surprised to see the paper in the driveway today.  I did tell her I hadn't decided if I was going to renew because of the change in the delivery.

It takes, at most, 30 seconds to get out of the car, run up the driveway, and get the paper on our doorstep.  For six days of delivery, that's 180 seconds or three minutes.  For a month, it's around 12 minutes.  What am I willing to pay for that?  I think $20 an hour is fair for someone delivering papers.

I think the ADN should give readers an option.  For $21 a month, they can have the paper delivered to the door step.  The carrier would get all the money, not the newspaper.

Now let me complicate it a bit.  We're gone maybe a total of three months between November  and early March.  While we're gone we just get the electronic version.

I'll send them this post.  If it's too complicated for them administratively, maybe they can give me the phone number of the paper carrier and I can work it out with her or him.

Recruiting Vampires

When I was in college a good friend from high school married a total jerk.  I was studying in Germany that year and I think I restrained myself from sending a card that just said, "Don't."  She was divorced not too long after the wedding.  At our 20th or 25th  high school reunion I asked her if anything could have stopped her.  She said her father was abusing her at home and it was the only way she could see to get out of the house.

So desperate people do desperate things.  They answer recruiting ads from ISIS.  They join the army.  They join Christian cults.  They take drugs.

If your family believes every word in the bible is true and all the people you socialize with believe the same and you go to a Christian school that teaches the earth is 6000 years old, and you are presented material like this 'proof' of the biblical age of the earth, well, it's easy to believe.  It's not any harder to believe than immaculate conception and that Christ arose from the dead.

The dangers of vaccination if packaged right can also cause people to keep their kids from being vaccinated.

Ignorance and desperation together make people susceptible to any propaganda - like the pizza parlor based human trafficking ring,  or that climate change is a hoax, or that world will end when Christ returns to earth, though some Christians debate whether there will be a 'rapture.'

So while I was amused at first to see comments on this blog recruiting people to become vampires, I got got concerned, but also curious.  Most of these comments go to a post called, The Vampire History of Alaska.  I mark them spam as soon as I get them.  They tend to look like this one which came from someone in Accra, Ghana:

"Good Day,
Do You Want To Be A Vampire?
Been A Vampire Will Make You
• Make Stronger.
• Think Faster.
• World Famous
• Will Never Experience Suffering Anymore In Your Life.
• Can Never Be Oppressed By Anyone
• Above All You Will Live Very Long on Earth And Be Protected All Through Your Life.
For More Info About Been A Vampire & If You Interested On Been A Vampire Kindly Contact This Email
Contact Me: realvampire.......@xxxxxx.xxx" 

Here's the info stat counter offers me for each person who comes to the site.  This is the detailed page for the vampire comment above.

Many of them look more like this:

Gina has left a new comment on your post "Vampire History of Alaska - Why You Should Vote Ye...":
DO YOU WANT TO BE A VAMPIRE OR YOU WANT POWERS AND PROTECTION COME AND BE AMONG THE VAMPIRES KINGDOM TODAY AND YOU GET WHAT EVER YOU DESIRE CONTACT LORD GUMBALA AT ( . . . vampire . . . @x x x x x  )
Welcome to ( Gumbala Vampire Kingdom). Do you want to be a vampire,still in human,having talented brain turning to a vampire in a good posture in ten minutes to a human again, with out delaying in a good human posture. A world of vampire where life get easier,we have made so many persons vampires and have turned them rich,you will assured long life and prosperity,you shall be made to be very sensitive to mental alertness,stronger and also very fast,you will not be restricted to walking at night only even at the very middle of broad day light you will be made to walk, this is an opportunity to have the human vampire virus to perform in a good posture.if you are interested contact us on . . .vampire. . .@gmail.com 

I was tempted to email and ask about how many people respond to these comments, but I have lots of other things to do and I'd rather not get targeted by vampire recruiters.

Fortunately, The Bloggess did contact a vampire recruiter in 2017 and did a great job of engaging the recruiter.  You can read all that here. 

Mar Vista Wall Art

I Biked over to the Mar Vista post office yesterday and there was a surprising number of murals on the way.  

@madsteez or his website

Philsantosart

Pink Riches

@Poetrylane

It's cool that artists can tag their work now and you can find them easily online.  Unfortunately I wasn't paying enough attention when I took the pictures and I didn't get all their links.

Plant Trees While You Browse, But Does It Really Work?

Someone in Holland got here (this blog) via a browser called "Ecosia."  I'd never heard of it before so I checked it out.

The image isn't too clear, but if you click on it you'll get to Ecosia search engine and you can play around there to find out more about what they're about.

For those wondering why planting trees is a good thing, here's a list of reasons from ClimateRally

1. An average size tree creates sufficient oxygen in one year to provide oxygen for a family of four.
2. Planting trees in the right place around buildings and homes can cut air-conditioning costs up to 50 percent. 
3. Planting trees for the environment is good as they are renewable, biodegradable and recyclable. 
4. If we plant 20 million trees, the earth will get with 260 million more tons of oxygen.
5. Once acre of trees can remove up to 2.6 tons of Carbon Dioxide each year.
6. During photosynthesis, trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen.
7. Trees keep in cheek the air and water pollution.
8. Why planting trees is important is evident as they are the natural habitat of the animals and birds, as well as many endangered species.
9. Planting trees means more wood and paper products which can be easily recycled.
10. A newly planted whole forest, can change tons of atmospheric carbon into wood and other fibrous tissue, thus reducing global warming.

Here''s more from Trees Utah.

I was really excited about this, but figured I better do some checking to see how they can do this and whether I can trust them.

Does Ecosia do what it says?

Reviewopedia discusses what Ecosia says about itself, but doesn't seem to have any independent analysis.

Green Review gives a fairly harsh review, saying that Eosia uses Bing, which is owned by Microsoft and that clicks, not searches, generate money for trees.  But only after Microsoft gets its cut. It recommends Google over Ecosia.

A Path Around The World - has a long and thoughtful review.  But it doesn't mention the connection to Bing and Microsoft at all.  But it looks at Ecosia's financial reports (unaudited self-reporting) and does some comparisons of its utility as a browser to Google.

Being ethically responsible isn't easy.  Make your own evaluation.

The Cost Of Airshows, What I Know About You, And Unobtrusive Measures

As the title suggests, I'm trying to kill three birds with one post.  But everything is connected and so I'm showing just three of the interconnected issues here.

Let's start with the cost of airshows.

I wrote a post in 2012 called Air Shows And The Cost Of Military Fuel.  I gathered what information I could and made some very general calculations.  I wasn't terribly happy with it because there were so many unknowns.  But there wasn't all that much out there and apparently still isn't since that post still regularly gets a fair number of hits from all over the world.

But as I checked StatCounter* this morning, I noticed a hit from Lockheed Corporation.  And then one from Boeing.  And another one last night from the US Senate.

click image to enlarge and focus

What I Know About You

That image above is a Photoshopped grouping of three different records from StatCounter.

StatCounter is one of many tools websites, including blogs, can use to track visitors to their sites.  I moved to StatCounter from Sitemeter after Sitemeter gave me all sorts of problems.  I suspect my regular readers got tired of my complaining and were happy when I switched and they stopped hearing about it.

Everyone who surfs the web should know about the information that is collected from them by each website they visit.  Sitemeter packaged that data about each individual visitor in a whole page that included more that StatCounter individual reports.  But StatCounter packages the info in a way that makes it faster to view and breaks out a lot more information in different reports.

But all these programs simply use the information that your computer collects on visitors and packages it in different formats.

If you click on the image, it will enlarge and focus so you can read it.  I don't get all this information from everyone.  First, I suspect there are a lot of visitors StatCounter doesn't even report.  I say this because Google Analytics says I have a lot more visitors than StatCounter reports, but it doesn't give me such detailed info on each visitor.
Also, some visitors have scrubbed their info - whether their internet provider does that, or they have done it themselves.  Another way is to use a proxy server which hides all the info.

I'd also note that if you use the private browsing feature of your browser, that only hides info about what sites you visit on your own computer.  You still leave tracks at the websites you visit.

I have put this sort of info up now and then because I think most folks really have no idea of how much info they leave around while surfing the web.  And I'm often surprised at how organizations leave their names up so people can see that they have visited.  And part of me doesn't want to post things like this which may alert them and cause them to disguise their identity.  I like knowing that these visitors visit.

I'd also note that all this information - plus more - is how browsers and others make lots of money selling it to advertisers.   These are, unobtrusive measures, because most people leave these tracks without knowing.  The main way people have any clue about any of this comes from the pop-up ads we get after visiting a particular site.  If you delete the cookies, some of them will end.

Unobtrusive Measures

"Unobtrusive measures are measures that don't require the researcher to intrude in the research context. Direct and participant observation require that the researcher be physically present. This can lead the respondents to alter their behavior in order to look good in the eyes of the researcher. A questionnaire is an interruption in the natural stream of behavior. Respondents can get tired of filling out a survey or resentful of the questions asked.
Unobtrusive measurement presumably reduces the biases that result from the intrusion of the researcher or measurement instrument. However, unobtrusive measures reduce the degree the researcher has control over the type of data collected. For some constructs there may simply not be any available unobtrusive measures."

The site goes on to identify three different types of unobtrusive measures.

I mention this because these tracks that people leave on websites are a form of unobtrusive measure.  My use of it is very informal and unorganized.  Every now and then I'll suddenly get a bunch of hits for an old post and it will alert me that something is happening related to something in the post.  Once I got a bunch of hits for a post about the director of the Alaska DMV, mostly from Texas.  So I started checking and found out she'd taken a job as the head of the Texas DMV.  The counter alerted me to that.

Another time a post suddenly got a bunch of hits and it turned out a British newspaper had a puzzle and my post had one of the answers. Here's a 2009 post that chronicles that event and several others where I was alerted to something by the hits on a particular post.

So, for what it is worth, today I got three hits on this post about the cost of fuel for airshows.  Three isn't a lot of hits, but when they are from Boeing, Lockheed, and the US Senate, it suggests that perhaps someone is looking into that issue.

Now, I don't know if the visitor from, say Boeing or the US Senate, was doing this officially or it was just someone privately surfing while at work.  But given the three hits from these three I suspect there's an interesting reason.  Is a budget committee examining the costs of air shows?  Or is it something else buried in the post?  For most google searches I no longer get the actual search terms - that's something they've done to improve user security - so I don't know for sure what they were looking for.  I just know where they landed.