Nome Stop

Wales is fogged in. We're in Nome. Going into town. Checking on weather later.

Headed for Wales, Alaska

All the photos in this post can be enlarged by clicking.

This may be the last post for several days. Joan and I are headed to the Westernmost point of the North American mainland, the village of Wales. (There are some islands further west.) Our friend Joe was born and raised in Wales and has put together a small writing workshop there. We couldn't refuse such a great invitation.

The top map of North America is from Joe's 1971 book Give or Take a Century and was done by Joe as are all the illustrations. On the Atlas map of Alaska, you can see Anchorage in the lower right and Nome on the left. Wales is a little above Nome (Under Little Diomede which is an island a mile from Big Diomede. Little is in the US and Big is in Russia).





This last map is another Joe drew of Wales almost 40 years ago. We'll see if it still is useful.













Here's the cover page of the book.














This is the beginning of the chapter about Wales in Joe's book. Click on it to enlarge.

Pulling Out of Iraq

Rosa Brook's July 13 piece from the LA Times helped crystallize some questions I've been having about the calls for withdrawal from Iraq.

Basically, the same people saying we should withdraw from Iraq are saying we should do something about Darfur. It is hard to get a good sense of exactly what would happen if we withdrew - whether our presence is the problem or whether our withdrawal will open the flood gates for even worse violence.

As bad as Saddam Hussein was, the lives of Iraqis appear to be much worse today than before we invaded. And under Hussein, Iran was kept in check. And even those of us who can say we didn't vote for Bush and that we opposed the war from the beginning, have some responsibility for not protesting louder and more effectively. It is the US that has gotten Iraq into this situation. Now that we've totally mucked things up, can we with a straight face say, "Ooops, sorry, we screwed up. Better leave now."

Brooks' article critiques the basic arguments being offered both for and against withdrawal including mine above. The issue, of course, is about our ability to accomplish a better outcome by staying than by leaving.

Clearly we have obligations to the Iraqi people. But are we capable of meeting those obligations? I think one key strategy is to get other countries involved in the peace keeping. When the war began, companies from countries that didn't support the war were kept out of the contracts in Iraq. Cheney's company, Halliburton, has profited hugely from the war. Perhaps France and Germany might have more interest in helping keep the peace if their companies got part of the action.

It's clearly an incredible mess, largely of our own making. Will our withdrawal help wind down the violence? I suspect things will get worse before they get better, and in the end, Al Qaida and/or its allies will control the oil of Iraq. Way to go George.

Blogging Is Good For Your Health

When I searched for a link for a health article in the Anchorage Daily News on Tuesday, July 17, 2007, I found it was first published

10 ways to improve your health in 2006
By Julie Deardorff, Tribune health and fitness reporter

Chicago Tribune
January 8, 2006

Most of the tips are things we hear all the time - exercise, eat right, get enough sleep, etc. But #5 shows us that blogging is now in the top ten health tips:

5. Do the write thing

Deepak Chopra, medical doctor and proponent of alternative medicine, calls journaling "one of the most powerful tools we have to transform our lives," but don't just take his word for it. Start one. Journaling helps release and process emotions, it provides clarity and can help you find your inner voice.

"Your writings, musings and doodles are a way to talk to your soul," writes Sandy Grason in "Journalution" (New World Library, $14.95).

There is no best or right way to journal. Pick a medium--a spiral notebook, a blank book labeled "diary," drawing paper, a computer--then write whatever you want whenever the mood hits. An obsessive journaler since 4th grade (I have more than 70 notebooks), I favor a portable, lined desk journal by Raika that is small enough to carry at all times.

Don't know where to start? Write what you eat every day. (It could help you lose weight.) Write what you do. Write what you feel. Eventually, journaling will become a natural habit, a conversation with yourself. And although you might not want to go back and re-read some of the darker moments you've chronicled (feel free to rip these pages up), your journal inevitably will preserve precious snapshots of your life.

New MacBook

After over a year of being a squatter on my wife's Mac Mini, I have finally bought my own Mac Power Book. Ben, whom I met first at the Alaska Apple Users' Group, is the Apple rep at Comp USA on Dimond. He also graduated from Stellar Alternative School in Anchorage (as did my daughter) and is a philosophy major at UAA (my daughter is doing her graduate work in philosophy) and I know his faculty adviser. But I'd already been impressed by his knowledge of the computers and his helpfulness. So, any Anchorage folks interested in Apple products, I highly recommend calling Ben.

Rating Baseball, Scoring Legislators

There must be a way for the media to cover politics with more depth and substance so that politics is as interesting as sports. Certainly the West Wing did that. Now how about doing that for our legislators and other elected officials. And posting stats that give us real information.

Well, this all came from first spending a week at the Anderson trial and then having my son show me this baseball stats website.

This site that rates baseball
not just individual ball players, but also teams. It goes way beyond the standard baseball statistics, tweaking them to get more meaningful data.

Here's a list of the different basic statistical charts they have:

Offense Batter's Quality of Pitchers Faced Double Play Rate for Batters Equivalent Average League Batting by Position VORP for Position Players VORP for Rookie Position Players	Pitching Miscellaneous Pitching Stats Pitcher Abuse Points Pitcher Expected Win-Loss Records Pitcher's Quality of Batters Faced Relievers Expected Runs Relievers Expected Wins Added Starting Pitcher Bullpen Support VORP for Pitchers VORP for Rookie Pitchers
General League Batting Averages League Pitching Averages Pitcher Defensive Efficiency RBI Opportunities Run Expectancy Matrix Umpires Report Win Expectancy Matrix	Team Current Adjusted Standings Playoff Odds Report Playoff Odds Report (ELO adjusted) Playoff Odds Report (PECOTA adjusted) Postseason Series Odds Team Defensive Efficiency Team Record by RA Team Records By RS Team Streaks Team record by Run Difference

For example, if you go to "Equivalent Average" above under "Offfense" the charts will have (among many others) a column labeled RARP. It defines this as:

RARP	[ Return To Top ]

Runs Above Replacement, Position-adjusted. A statistic that compares a hitter's Equivalent Run total to that of a replacement-level player who makes the same number of outs and plays the same position. A "replacement level" player is one who has .736 times as many EqR as the average for the position; that corresponds to a .351 winning percentage. Used when fielding data is unavailable.

The site is trying to more closely refine the statistics so they take into consideration more of the things that affect the quality. Comparing players to RP's - Replacement Players - who are somewhat below the average player for that position is one way to do this. They are trying to find how much of a real impact individual players have on the team.

They also rate whole teams and look at things like what do teams get for what they spend.

After a week of trial listening to lobbyists talking about how they find ways to gain influence over legislators, the baseball stats got me thinking about how much time people spend on sports stats and how much people know about sports, but how little they now about political stats and politics. What if there were information about politicians like there is about sports? Of course, the basics of sports is easier to keep track of and there are great statistics for each player. While there are election stats, there aren't great stats for how good a legislator is.

I did some googling and mostly what I could find are ratings based on votes. Various special interest groups pick certain legislation and then give legislators points for voting "the right way" on bills they are interested in.
For example:

Holding Lawmakers Accountable
Paychecks Hawaii Gives Some of the Harshest Ratings Yet to Legislators Who Hurt Business
By Hawaii Reporter Staff, 6/6/2002 1:34:32 AM

Paychecks Hawaii, an independent, non-partisan political action affiliate of the small business advocacy organization Small Business Hawaii, just released its annual ratings of state legislators, with those in charge of rating legislatohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrs saying this is one of the worst yet legislative sessions for business.

and

Clean Water Action Michigan 2005-2006 Legislative Environmental Scorecard

There are a few sites that collect those interest group vote ratings so that you can look at a legislator from lots of different perspectives. But these are really rough numbers compared to what we have for baseball. I've got links to a few sites to let you see some of what's out there.


WHAT IS IN THE REPORT CARDS

CRC Updates History

Each "report card" is an easy-to-understand graphical report that shows how closely the position on legislation of a member of Congress matched the position on legislation of one or more advocacy groups over the period of up to six years .

For members' position, we use either

* the members' voting record (how they voted on the floor of Congress), or
* the members' cosponsorship of legislation (whether they have officially signed up as a sponsor of a proposed piece of legislation).

We extract the voting record and cosponsorship data from the Congressional Record.

The groups' position comes from the groups' publications that we monitor. The advocacy groups analyze the legislation they consider important and publish the results of their legislative research.

Kathleen Carlisle Fountain, Political Science and Social Work Librarian Reference Librarian at California State University, Chico (kfountain@csuchico.edu) maintains the website "Political Advocacy Groups" which includes a Directory of United States Lobbyists. On the page on Rating Congressional Members, she writes:

On the subject category pages, groups who routinely rate members of Congress are identified by this image: . Project Vote Smart and Voter Information Services each offer a list of who conducts "performance evaluations." The Voter Information Services site even provides the numerical ratings by some organizations.

Further down on her page she has a list of the groups on her site that rate Congress.


Project Vote Smart is a comprehensive site that bills itself as non-partisan and gives lists of ratings from all different groups that rate candidates. It pulls together a lot of information but it's up to the reader to go through it all and do the analysis.


PollingReport.com gives lists of polling data from different polls (AP-Ipsos, CBS, Newsweek, Gallup, etc.) on %Approve and %Disapprove of Congress from September 2005 to the present.

Then are sites that critique the ratings:

And then there are criticisms of the ratings:

Maine House Democrats analyze the Maine Economic Research Institute ratings:

MERI and the Politics of Distortion

The Maine Economic Research Institute (MERI), issued a scorecard last year which rates each legislator on his or her “supportiveness” of business. The group updated and reissued the scorecard over the summer. While MERI claims to behttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif “scientific” in its approach, it is clearly and blatantly biased against and far from scientific.

The Wilamette Weekly takes a totally different approach:

Every two years, as the Oregon Legislature winds down, WW allows anonymous sources to rate Portland-area lawmakers.

Why have we done this for 32 years?

Because there's no better way to assess the region's 38 legislators as good, bad or awful than to ask the lobbyists who know them best—and because nobody has less incentive than lobbyists to speak candidly.

We recently sent more than 120 surveys to lobbyists for business and unions, advocates for single causes and contract lobbyists who represent all comers. These are the people who mingle with legislators each day, buy them meals, drinks and Hawaiian junkets, and finance their election campaigns. And we also checked in with legislative staffers and members of the legislative press corps.

But Norman R. Luttbeg's article in Legislative Studies Quarterly examines "The Validity and Electoral Impact of Media Estimations of "Best" or "Worst" State Legislators" The abstract says the ratings matter:

Many news organizations have ranked or rated state legislators in their state as "best" or "most effective" and "worst" or "least effective," sometimes using several groups of informants, such as legislators, lobbyists, agency heads, and capital correspondents. Other organizations merely give the impressions of reporters. Obviously those rated worst are displeased with this evaluation and at least somewhat anxious as to what it will mean when they next face an election. This study assesses the validity of these rankings and their impact at the polls. The media rankings cannot be dismissed as invalid, and legislators cannot dismiss their impact at the polls. It helps to be ranked as among the best and it hurts to be among the worst, although the effects are small.

So this really calls for getting much, much more sophisticated ways to measure legislators and to get more bi-partisan websites that have credible objectivity to evaluate the data. I'm going to think on this for a while. So let me know what other better stats exist already.

More From the Alaska Botanical Gardens

On the same outing to Campbell Creek Friday, we stopped at the Alaska Botanical Garden which I blogged about before.



The peonies are... I'll let them speak for themselves.






























The Himalayan blue poppies, what can I say? Nice counterbalance to politics and trials. The peony pix can be enlarged with a click.

Besides the Cow Parsnip

There was also lots of monk's hood. Look carefully for the bee.




We made it up to the rock that marks the transition from trees to mostly tundra. Looking back down you can see the whole Anchorage bowl and if you squint, the waters of Cook Inlet. (Again the pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them.)







Looking up you can see into the clouds.

Cow Parsnip - Heracleum

We hiked up the Wolverine Peak trail today. It was clearly Cow Parsnip Day. Everywhere we were surrounded by the large white flowers of the cow parsnip plant. The pictures below were all taken today in Anchorage. You can click on any of them to enlarge it. The information on Cow Parsnips come from the links.

Cow Parsnip
Heracleum maximum (Heracleum lanatum)
• Family: Carrot (Apiaceae)
• Habitat: moist meadows, thickets, streambanks
• Height: 4-9 feet
• Flower size: 1/4 to 1/2 inch across, in clusters 4-8 inches across
• Flower color: white
• Flowering time: June to August
• Origin: native

From Connecticut Botanical Society

Cow parsnip Heracleum lanatum has been used medicinally. The root for toothaches (placed directly to the area) or you can also use a tincture of the root or seeds, it is less irritating to the gums than cloves. The root and seeds are used as an antispasmodic to the intestinal tract. If used in a tea, make sure it is dried first, the tea is used for nausea of a persistent nature, when you have not yet vomited, as well as acid indigestion and heart burn according to Micheal Moore in Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West. The seeds tinctured are effective for stomach aches, the dose should be one or two drops. Do not use this plant during pregnancy or nursing.

From The Herbalist's Path Blog

Cow parsnip is a valuable forage species for livestock, deer, elk, moose, and bear. Moose in Montana and Yellowstone National Park eat cow parsnip. In low elevation riparian areas it is an important food for grizzly bear, especially in the spring. In Glacier National Park, cow parsnip comprised 15 percent of grizzly bear total diet volume, spring through fall, in 1967-1971 and 1982-1985.

From Little Flower's Medicine of North American Plants

This is the largest species of the carrot family in North America. The genus is named for Hercules, who is reputed to have used these plants for medicine. Early in each year, Native Americans peeled and ate the young sweet, aromatic leaf and flower stalks.

From eNature.com

This very tall plant has huge leaves and flat umbels of numerous tiny white flowers; stem is grooved, woolly, hollow, and stout.
Flowers: umbel to 12" (30 cm) wide, often in groups; each flower with 5 petals, those at margin of umbel larger, about 1/4" (6 mm) long, cleft in middle, often tinged with purple.

From eNature











People new to Alaska often confuse Cow Parsnip (left below) with Devil's Club (right below.) You can see from these two pictures, both have large leaves that initially seem similar.










The Devil's Club leaves have hooked thorns underneath.







































"The green stems of pushki [cow parsnip] are covered with fine hairs, which give them a slightly fuzzy or furry texture." From Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Refuge Notebook.

The [Devil's Club] plant grows 5 to 8 feet (1.5 to 2.4 meters) tall and is covered with thorns up to an inch (2.5 centimeters) long."Even the leaves have little-bitty thorns," said Peggy Hunt, an agronomist at the Native Plant Nursery in Palmer, Alaska. "They go through your skin. You wear jeans, they still go through those jeans. And the thorns will fester. It's like getting a splinter. You really have to dig them out."

From National Geographic The National Geographic article goes on to talk about the medicinal aspects of Devil's Club.



For some people Cow Parsnip poses a danger of severe skin problems.

Known Hazards Many members of this genus, including this species[65], contain furanocoumarins. These have carcinogenic, mutagenic and phototoxic properties. The fresh foliage can cause dermatitis[21]. If the juice and hairs of the outer skin are left on the face and mouth, they can cause blisters[212]. This effect is especially prevalent for people with fair complexions[256].

From Plants for a Future

It is interesting to ask if this phototoxicity has any adaptive value for the members of the carrot family? Is this toxicity, for example, a chemical defense against some kind of plant-eating animal (herbivore)? First, we should note that bears and moose eat young pushki plants, apparently without suffering any kind of sunburn effects. Indeed, in the Lower-48 pushki is considered a valuable forage species for deer, elk, moose, and livestock. A study in Glacier National Park found that pushki comprised 15% of grizzly bear diet, spring through fall. All this suggests that mammals, other than humans, are not bothered by any phototoxicity effects of pushki.

Nevertheless, you don't see many insects eating pushki. A fascinating study of a close cousin, wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa), found that the furanocoumarins were potent deterrents for most insects, but one insect has evolved the ability to break down the furanocoumarins and eat wild parsnip. This insect - a caterpillar called the "parsnip webworm" (Depressaria pastinacella) - also eats pushki. If we ever need a biocontrol agent for pushki, parsnip webworm would be a good place to start.

From Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Refuge Notebook.


[Update  June 2010:  Here's a link to a the Juneau-Douglas Science fair and a video of David Mendivil who explains his project "How the Concentration of Light Activated Furanocoumarins Found in Cow Parsnip Affects the Mortality Rate of Mosquito Larvae."]

GRRRR! Youtube Quality destroys Salmon Video

Took Beth (who's visiting from Texas) to Campbell Creek as the rain mostly ended Friday afternoon. Salmon were making their way up the creek and they are red enough at this point that this one showed up pretty well in the video I took. But saving it in a format small enough for Youtube made this all but unviewable. But I've been playing with it for so long I'm going to put it up anyway in hopes that someone can suggest a better way to save it or a better video host than youtube. (I saved it from i-movie. The best quality was 332 MB - too big for youtube. The next best was 12mb - that's the one you see here. Pretty awful. Not only does the crystal clear water water look muddy, you can barely see the fish until near the end.)