Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Wales - 1




Tryying to figure out how to post about Wales, I've decided to let my pictures structure the story and go in chronological order. There are lots of overlapping stories here, but rather than isolate them out, I'll let them unfold (or not) as I experienced them. For the beginning of this Wales trip including maps go to July 18, 2007.

We got the flight go-ahead at 11am on Friday and flew into the Wales airport on a new Beechcraft. Here we are at the airstrip in Wales with our luggage out. Four-wheelers were out at the airport to pick up luggage and we walked the ten minutes to the community center, passing grassy marsh land.


We had to decide where to stay. People had sleeping bags to put in offices in the Community Center, several of us brought tents. Alice, who's from Bethel, wanted to sleep out on the beach, so I went along to see if that would work for Joan too.





On the way we passed Marie who was going a little out of town to a large pond to fill up on water. Wales doesn't have running water. People said they did, but it was chlorinated and the State health people said that wasn't safe. So now they get the same unsafe water, but they have to get it in buckets. Or so that is what I was told.





Alice gave a warm hello to everyone we passed and the warmth was returned by all. A group of kids followed us to the beach. Shawna, the one in the hooded sweatshirt, became a buddy She's also the daughter of Joanne and Tony who were both participants in the writing workshop. Alice got her tent up on the beach, despite warnings by locals that it would get extremely windy and blow away. She piled rocks on all the stakes and in the tent.





Walking back through town to the Community Center after Alice's tent was up. In the end, Tony convinced me to put our tent just behind the community center so we wouldn't have to walk so far.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Back from Wales in Sunny Nome

We spent Thursday night in Nome because Wales was fogged in. There were six residents of Wales who joined the ten of us (plus our workshop facilitator Kim) who came from outside. With Alice (from Bethel) and Joe (from Wales) we had more Alaska Native participants than non-Native.

The people of Wales were incredibly hospitible and we share a lot. I'll blog more and post lots of pictures when we get back to Anchorage, but I'm just taking a moment in the Nome library to get back on. The sun is shining here in Nome. (We only had about an hour of sun in 3.5 days in Wales, that was after the drummers had been practicing for two hours one evening.) It was warm enough that I put on my shorts at the beach and tested the waters of the Bering Sea.

We have a few hours to wander the beaches of Nome and see if we can find a few birds that normally we can't see.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Nome Detour

Flying into Nome - Bering Strait [Norton Sound on the Bering Sea] in the background.




Kim, the workshop facilitator, has a brand new Mac Book so I can keep blogging as long as we have internet connections. Here he is as our luggage gets moved to the Bering Air office.

We checked in, got all our luggage weighed, sat and talked, before finding out that it was foggy in Wales and that we couldn't take off.








Bering Air's bus took us to the Airport Cafe in town which looks like hip coffee shop anywhere for lunch.










Downtown Nome sits right on the Bering Strait.





Then we walked into town to visit Faith's library. Faith is one of the group members who works for the Reindeer Bridge Project, to draw the connections among the Arctic Indiginous peoples who herd reindeer.







Every hour Catherine calls the Bering Air office to see if we can fly.



Right now we're in the visitors center and Catherine is calling places to stay. The weather is lifting somewhat here in Nome. Four o'clock call was a no-go. If we can't fly out at 5pm, we spend the night in Nome.

Nome Stop

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

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

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.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

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.

Monday, July 16, 2007

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.