The Hills Are Alive . . .

Seeing the Chugach Mountains from town is one of the perks of living here in Anchorage. The changing light and seasons mean that the familiar always has a different look and while waiting at a traffic light you can look up into the wilderness and now it's close by.
This was Tuesday on the way to a meeting, waiting at the Glenn Highway and Bragaw. (Yes, sometimes I drive if the places I'm going are too far apart to get to on a bike, or if I have to carry something that doesn't fit in my backpack. Or the weather or roads are dicey...)

This was after lunch today at the Thai Kitchen.
The golds and reds are starting to show.

Dennis Zaki took his video camera up to Powerline Pass (about 20 minute drive from downtown Anchorage) the other night and got these great shots of bull moose hanging around, waiting for the mating season to officially open.

The Magnificent Moose from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

After I watched the video, I emailed him to say I thought the video was great, but that the music was kind of cheesy.

"As many times as I've been up there," I wrote, "I've never heard any music."

He wrote back:

"Yes it was weird, the music just started playing as soon as I got there!"

So, yes, Rogers and Hammerstein were right.

Where's Political Music of the Bush and Obama Eras?

After posting the video on Mary Travers in the previous post, I realized that while there was a reason I posted it, lots of people would have no idea of the significance of Peter, Paul, and Mary and the many other musicians of the sixties. Just posting it without saying anything would mean little. I realized I needed to supply a little context. So here it is.

In the early sixties we had the civil rights movement which overlapped with the anti-war movement which came a bit later. Both these movements were accompanied by an incredible musical score. I almost said background music, but while it was ALWAYS in the background, there were times when it was front and center stage.

Peter, Paul and Mary (Travers of the previous post) were part of this musical rhetoric that kept people inspired through difficult times. They were just a part of a whole army of musicians supplying strong, melodic, and uplifting anthems. So I supplemented my memories of those days with a Google search. Ask.com says:

Civil rights would have been won without the participation of blues, gospel, and folk singers and songwriters, but the participation of musicians and the effectiveness of sing-alongs certainly helped an incredible amount.

The songs on this list don't even begin to capture the hundreds of tunes that have been written about civil rights in America (and around the world), but if you're looking to learn more about music during the civil rights movement, this is a good primer for your journey. [Go to the ask.com link for their list of most important songs.]

PBS had a fund-raiser documentary on Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement with a three CD box set. It looks like it will be on at 10:30 this Saturday night (Sept. 19) in Washington, DC at WETA and again Monday night.

The point though, is that there was an incredible musical back up to the movements. Folk songs were big in the mid-60's and there was something called the 'hootenany' which was folk song singalongs. There was even a hootenany television show.

"MTV Unplugged?" Nope, it's Hootenanny, the ABC-TV series that capitalized on the popularity of folk music during the early 1960's. If it's remembered at all today, it's as the show that blacklisted Pete Seeger, a last gasp of McCarthyism that led to a boycott by Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul & Mary; The Kingston Trio - practically every folk act that meant anything to the masses.

But when Hootenanny appeared in March 1963, it held a lot of promise. Each segment was taped at a different college campus, the audience consisting of students. Shows ran for a half-hour on Saturday night, and featured four acts. The music was literally non-stop. Host Jack Linkletter (eldest son of Art) would quickly introduce each artist or group, and they all took turns after doing a song. During the thirty minutes a "headliner" act did three or four songs, two supporting acts did two songs apiece, a third act (usually a soloist) did one song, and everybody joined in for the closing number - usually something simple like Goodnight Irene or "Little Liza Jane."[Michael J. Hayde writes More at tvparty.com about many of the acts that appeared - he says his dad audio taped all the shows. ]

As the Vietnam War began to heat up in the sixties, some of these artists crossed over to the anti-war movement and their music, along with the addition of rock and roll protest songs, were important inspiration.

Which raises the point - where are the stirring anti-war anthems of today? Where are the folk songs that call the health care victims to the streets, arm-in-arm? I'm the first to admit being out of touch with today's pop music, so I'm sure others might be able to jump in and tell me where to find it. Clearly rap taps into the kind of urban frustrations that Pete Seeger tapped into, but too often rather than pointing toward ways to overcome, it turns into violent, misogynist rants. It's not that there aren't rappers who have a more positive message, but in the sixties, there was no one in the US who didn't know Blowing in the Wind and We Shall Overcome.

If that kind of music, with that kind of reach and power, exists today, I don't know about it. And we need it. To lift our souls through the nastiness of today's politics, just as the music lifted us above the nastiness of racism and the politics of the Vietnam War. Racism and war? Hmmm, We're still embroiled in those fights today. Where's the inspirational music of today?

Good Bye Mary Travers

YouTube from adelfred.
[Update: I've added some context to this in the next post. And if you follow the link to Blowin in the Wind, you can see Peter, Paul, and Mary 30 or 40 years earlier, singing one of the most important anthems of the civil rights movements.]

What happens to your trash?

I was getting ready to go to bed but first I had to take out the trash that's collected tomorrow. But then there was the NY Times in my email. You know how going to bed at ten ends up going to bed at 2am.

According to the NY Times:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

The MIT site tells us:

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

I couldn't find where online the garbage is being tracked. At least I can track most of our summer, raw, kitchen vegetable scraps. They go about 50 feet to the compost heap and then get scattered onto our various flower beds after the worms and other bugs take care of them and the leaves and our neighbor's grass clippings.

But it would be interesting to find out where some of the other stuff goes. I hope not out to the trash island floating in the North Pacific.

The Seattle Public Library, which is one of the partners in this, will have an event Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.:



But I have to take the trash out now.

Krestia on Goldberg

I cringed when I heard that Jonah Goldberg was coming to talk to UAA students. It's not that he's a Conservative columnist, it's his style. My sense is that he's Rush with an academic veneer. His columns seem meant to anger, to distract us from real issues. Bring up Conservative columnists and Liberal columnists, but ones who bring their biases to what they study to illuminate and raise questions that cause us to rethink something we think we already know, or to start to grasp something we're scratching our heads about.

But I did think I should at least go and hear what he had to say, but I completely missed it by not keeping track of when it was supposed to be.

Fortunately, the Press went, and Krestia at the Anchorage Press wrote an interesting review of Goldberg's talk. (I say 'interesting' because I don't know how accurately he reported the talk, but what he wrote was interesting.) The basic point he says Goldberg made was that these are great times to be a journalist. I don't want to say much more since I wasn't there and you can read Krestia's column yourself at the link above.

Alaska Blogger's House Burns Down

[UPDATE 9-16-09 10:30am: Tea said I could post this picture from her blog. She also added a comment below. When I pressed her she said gift certificates to Sears would help - she's got 9 kids to clothe. Also looking into setting up a pay pal account for her.]

Tea N Crumpet's house burned down. Here blog Stress Management was one of the early ones and she writes about living in Wasilla with nine kids. There's not much I can say, but I did want to note it here. You can read about it at the link above and a follow up post from today.

The Red Cross was there along with the Firefighters with vouchers for a hotel. She did save her laptop as she mentions on my post below about mine being in the shop. No one got hurt, but Tea seems to have gulped some smoke retrieving her laptop and purse. (I have it back. The diagnostic on the hardware showed nothing wrong and the problem didn't appear while it was in the shop. I'm just using it now for the first time. My fingers are crossed it's ok.)

Tea, my heart goes out to you and your family. We do want to know how we can help out as you work your way back to some form of normal.

Do lasers work by focusing sound waves?

Take out a piece a paper and write the numbers 1-10, then mark the answers to the following questions:

True or False? (you've got a 50/50 chance)

1. Lasers work by focusing sound waves.

2. It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.

3. All radioactivity is man-made.

4. The center of the Earth is very hot.

5. The universe began with a huge explosion.

6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.

7. Electrons are smaller than atoms.

8. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (I know this isn't a true or false question, I didn't write this quiz)

9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals.

10. The continents have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move.

These are some of the questions on an international survey reported in Science and Engineering Indicators 2006.

I found this in my ongoing attempts to understand why so many people believe in government death panels, believe that medicare works well and they don't want the government taking it over, and other such silliness. (We get distorted ideas about the world.  On television ten thousand people seems important, but one million people is less than one-half of one percent of the adult US population.)

The best that Americans did on the questions above (the data for United States was 2004) was about 78% of people got the correct answer on questions #4 and #10. That means that about 22% of the folks got these two questions wrong. (Of course this was a sample of the US adult population - you have to understand some statistics and probability to understand the counter-intuitive notion that you can sample a small portion of the population and predict accurately what the whole population 'knows.' But assuming good statisticians were in charge, that means about 42 million people don't know the answers to #4 and #10.) (Remember, if people guessed on all the questions, the odds are they would have gotten half of them right.)

38% got question #2 (the father's gene) WRONG.

More than 40% got question #6 (antibiotics) WRONG.

I guess the most shocking was that 40% got question #8 (earth around the sun?) WRONG. For me this is more shocking because it is the most tangible concept and one that we can actually see and don't need too much coaching from grade school teachers to get. Maybe they should have asked about whether the earth was round or flat too.

Perhaps less surprising, but more disturbing were questions #5 (universe began) and #9 (human development from earlier species.) I say less surprising because it's a lot easier, conceptually, to understand that some giant bearded God, who leans from the clouds on the Vatican ceiling, created the universe and human beings than it is to understand the big bang theory or evolution. But over 65% got #5  and 58% got #8 wrong! I would add another caveat though. Reading beyond just the headline statistics, I found that when the question was phrased, "Scientific theory holds that ..." the correct/incorrect ratio flips. So, 20% know about the big bang and evolution, but just don't believe it. The other 40+% . . . who knows?

So how'd you do on the test? You can see the answers and the stats for the US, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, EU-25, and Russia on this page from the National Science Foundation. This particular test is a few years old - the US and EU data are 2005. How many know what EU-25 means? Some must because I do get hits from people in Europe.

What does this have to do with anything? Do people really need to know any of this stuff? Not to lead their daily lives, but they do if they expect to have a clue about global warming, nuclear energy, stem cell research, and whether the earth is more than 6,000 years old. Or what various public policies are about. I suspect that a lot of people have knowledge in some areas, but not others.

I also don't think that there's a correlation between political parties and knowing the answers, but I suspect that the people who believe what Sarah Palin says, on the whole, do less well on this than the average person. But that's simply a guess, but it would be interesting to find out.

So what happens when someone doesn't know something? I'd say there are a couple of key options. They can

1. Pretend like they do know.

2. Keep quiet and hope nobody asks them a question that will reveal their ignorance

3. Acknowledge they don't know and feel stupid and helpless.

4. Acknowledge they don't know and decide to find out the answers.

The scary thing is people who are confronted with their ignorance - get asked questions like those above or those right below - see they don't know the answers, but then go on to believe that their opinion on any of a number of public policy issues is just as good as someone who knows all the answers. Ignorance really means not knowing how much you don't know.

If the questions above seem a little distant from our daily lives (in a sense we can use modern technology and generally live our lives without understanding how it works, but since we are voters, our ignorance imperils all). Here are some questions relevant to terms we hear and/or are expected to make decisions about in the course of our daily lives.

1. An acre equals how many square miles? (When you hear that a fire burned 2,000 acres, do you have any idea how much that is?)

2. How much is the Anchorage [replace with your own city] Municipal budget? (If we don't even know how much the budget is, how can we say it is too high?  How do we know that our taxes are too high? Compared to what? How much would we pay for what our local government does if we had to pay private companies?  )

3. How many milligrams of salt are recommended for an adult per day?(This apparently varies from country to country.)

4. What are the five most populous countries in the world?

5. Write one word in a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet.

The first three questions cover concepts that are in the news every single day, yet most people can't answer them, though I'd guess number 3 will get the most right answers.

The last two we may not face every day, but wouldn't it be nice to know something about the countries of visitors and immigrants we meet?  Shouldn't we all be able to point out on a map where those five countries are? How about when we have a strong opinion about one of those countries? Those five countries make up 46 percent of the world's population. I'd say that we should know them before knowing the names of five deodorants or how many times Lindsay Lohan was arrested.

And the last one. You can survive without reading any Chinese characters, or not being able to read sushi in Japanese. But I promise you a lot of Japanese can read Starbucks in English.  I think non-Roman alphabets act like curtains to most people born in the US. They seem completely impenetrable. But they aren't really. Billions of people read Chinese, Russian, Arabic, or Hindi. 

In ten hours almost anyone could learn to read 20-50 words in a language with a different alphabet.  If you had a good teacher or a good book and the discipline to apply yourself. (Ten of the 20 most populous countries use non-Roman writing.)

Sorry.  I'm getting a little carried away here. I just want people to remember that few of us use a very large percent of our brains.  We have a lot of excess capacity.   Nevertheless, even people who use very little of that capacity are able to deceive themselves into thinking that their opinion is as good as anyone else's. Somehow, "the right to one's opinion" has morphed into "my opinion is as good as yours."

Until we each face our relative ignorance and gain a little more humility (if you aren't humbled looking at all the books in a library, what does that suggest?) we have little hope of getting along and taking care of the planet in a way that will sustain life.

Acres.

Anchorage Municipal budget.

Salt.

Populous Countries.

Black Screen Back so Back to MacHaus

The evil black screen came back last night after almost two days with no problem. As long as I don't leave my computer for more than a couple of minutes, I have no problem, but then it goes black and I have to reboot. Stephen at Apple thinks it might be a hardware malfunction and since it's still under warranty I can take it in to MacHaus and have them do a diagnostic. I did learn that the first call to Apple got me to the first level people and the second call on the same case number got me to a higher level expert who gave me a direct number back to him.

I hope this doesn't take long. Computer stores don't give loaner computers like some car places do when the car's being repaired. Besides, my computer is much more personalized than my car ever was. While I can blog from my wife's computer, all my stuff is on this one. But I do have everything backed up on the external hard drive.

Anchorage Daily News Updated Photo Policy - Icon-Sized Photos Usable

On August 14 I posted about the new acting police chief Steve Smith. The post incuded a photo of Smith I'd taken. The ADN posted an excerpt of the post and the photo along with a link to my blog.

I had done a post about the ADN letter to another blogger to take down a picture he'd gotten from their website and I'd supported the ADN's decision. But I also pointed out that the ADN had used blogger photos without permission in the newspaper and newsreader. While I favor general openness, I accepted what some people argue - that a photo is a complete work and so using the whole photo wasn't the same as taking a brief excerpt of text. The rules are evolving here and part of me is for sharing everything as long as there is proper credit and links. But when some people take other people's work stuff for profit, that isn't acceptable to me.

I wrote again about my own personal evolving guidelines for blogging two weeks ago and talked about photo policy there too. (There's another one where I talked about photo policy on pictures of kids.)

So, when the ADN had my photo of Smith up I emailed Mark Dent, who runs the ADN Newsreader, with copies to other higher ups at the ADN including publisher Pat Dougherty. I felt a little bad ratting on Mark like that without giving him a chance to make a correction first, but this was an issue bigger than him, and they needed to know their paper wasn't following the policy they insist bloggers follow.

I got an immediate reply from Dougherty apologizing, something about policy and actual practice needing to get in sync, and that the photo would be down before I got the email. Well, it wasn't. And it wasn't down later either. Mark sent an apology too saying he would take it down and there was some reference to fair use and 'icon-sized' photos. I asked him whether he was saying people could use 'icon-sized' photos of ADN pictures and he referred me up to the policy makers. I didn't follow up on it then, but last week when I checked out a sitemeter link from the ADN newsreader I found that the picture was still up and sent another email to the ADN.

I don't post the contents of private emails to me without the permission of the emailer, so I sent another email to Pat to ask if I could post his response and he wrote that was fine with him.

So, here's what I asked:

So, Pat, is the ADN policy now that it is ok to post 'icon size photos' even if they are copyrighted and you don't have permission? If so, I assume that means that is t[w]hat bloggers can do with ADN photos. Please clarify.

And he responded:

That's correct. I realize "icon-sized photo" is a term of art, without a precise definition. The intention is simply to provide our readers with the visual information that a photo is available by following the link provided. We try to do that with small versions of the photo that don't supplant the experience of viewing the photo in its full published form.

We are assured that's an appropriate fair use.

It's worth noting that the point of the Newsreader is to make it easy for readers to find content -- text or photos -- on sites other than our own. I have no issue with someone else doing the same with our material. [emphasis added]

"Supplant the experience of viewing a photo in its full published form" is definitely a term of art too. Thumbnail is a tiny picture that I interpret as smaller than what the ADN has published on the newsreader. Icon sized is what you see when you use Google image. Another aspect here is how big the photo file is. The basic question is, if the viewer clicks on the photo will it show up the same size or be much bigger. Originally, my photo of Smith could be enlarged on the ADN site, but they eventually changed that. [Now I can't even find the post anymore.] In fact it looks like they really are using smaller photos on the newsreader now, though most can be enlarged because, presumably, the ADN has copyright permission since they mostly are from AP or other Alaska newspapers.

I would note that when I googled - "icon-sized photo" fair use - I got this:

However, if you look up thumbnail sized photo and fair use, you get a lot of hits.

Wikipedia tells us this interpretation of the Fair Use Doctrine comes from

Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation (280 F.3d 934 (CA9 2002) withdrawn, re-filed at 336 F.3d 811(CA9 2003)) is a U.S. court case between a commercial photographer and a search engine company. During the case ownership of Arriba Soft changed to Sorceron, the operator of the Internet search engine Ditto.com. The court found that US search engines may use thumbnails of images (size limits not determined), though the issue of inline linking to full size images instead of going to the original site was not resolved.

Clearly a thumbnail of an image that someone searches for on a website or search engine is a different animal than the pictures at the ADN Newsreader. The Newsreader is more an extension of the ADN's news service, though Dougherty does phrase his reply to give it the search engine spin. But I'm not going to hire a lawyer over that. And the pictures the ADN is using now are getting pretty close to the size of the icons of pictures Google uses in Google image search results.

But Pat's email does say that the ADN photos can be used by bloggers without asking permission IF they are "icon-sized." Or better yet, thumbnail sized.

Kids Enjoy Chinese Cultural Fair in Anchorage

Yesterday afternoon I invited the daughters of friends to go to the Chinese Fair at UAA put on by the Confucius Institute. In the end, their parents came too. I was a little underwhelmed after the quality of Thursday night's performance. But even though the Student Union hadn't been transformed visually into a Chinese village fair, it turned out that the activities were good ones that got the kids and the adults involved.



Each table had some aspect of Chinese culture. This one was called Chinese toys and this was a game where you had to use chopsticks to move tiny beans from cup to cup.





This kid was really getting into the chance to learn some Chinese calligraphy. You can see the character for river (the three vertical lines) and below the character for mountain.





There was also origami - I didn't think to ask about the Chinese claim to what I thought was a Japanese artform.




There were also people who would write people's names on these tags using Chinese characters.













I was hoping to add something about Confucius Institutes in general but if I'm going to get this up, I'll have to leave that part for later. They are sponsored by the Chinese government through the Ministry of Education and they are a way for China to promote Chinese language and culture. There has been some criticism that this is a means of Chinese propaganda and even espionage. But I think the same claims can and have been made for Western organizations that do the same thing. One particular issue with universities is the extent to which the funding agreements give control to the Chinese over curriculum of regular university classes on language and China. One way universities have dealt with this is not by having the CI within academic units - such as the language department or other departments which might cover aspects of Chinese politics, history, etc. in their courses. My understanding of how this works at UAA is that the CI is NOT housed in an academic department, such as Languages, but separately with International Programs which has taken the place of the old American Russian Center.

The benefits, if this works out as hoped, will be extra resources to improve opportunities to study Chinese language in the Anchorage School System and the university and help for the business community that want to tap Chinese markets and resources. If this is going to be more than a symbolic presence, I suspect there will need to be more resources and a clearer focus on a few things that can be done well.

That's actually the gist of what I had to say. Perhaps I'll get up a post with more details another time.