Wednesday, November 04, 2009

L'ethnologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort

French is not a language I ever attempted seriously, but even I can understand this headline. Last year for Claude Lévi-Strauss' 100th birthday I did a series of posts about him and his works. (I even learned how to type the accent mark on my Mac keyboard -option 'e' - doing that series.) He would have been 101 on November 28, 2009.

After  recently spending several weeks in LA in the company of people ranging from 87 to 94, I think that wishing someone to live to 101 is more of a curse than a blessing. There are exceptions, and even those with the most challenging problems, can still live a meaningful life if they have some purpose, some task, some relationship to which they are still dedicated. And Peter Dunlap-Shohl's Parkinson's blog reminds me that life, not as we expected it or idealized it, still has great value to those who know how to find its blessings.

Good bye, Professor Lévi-Strauss. You've made great contributions to what humans know about humans.

From Le Monde:

L'ethnologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort


L'ethnologue et anthropologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort dans la nuit du samedi 31 octobre au dimanche 1er novembre à l'âge de 100 ans, selon le service de presse de l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) contacté par Le Monde.fr. Plon, la maison d'édition de l'auteur de Tristes Tropiques, a également confirmé l'information diffusée par Le Parisien.fr en fin d'après-midi. Claude Lévi-Strauss, qui a renouvelé l'étude des phénomènes sociaux et culturels, notamment celle des mythes, aurait eu 101 ans le 28 novembre.


Here's how the LA Times started off their report for those, like me, who need an English version:
OBITUARY
Claude Levi-Strauss dies at 100; French philosopher's ideas transformed anthropology


By Thomas H. Maugh II November 4, 2009

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday at his home in Paris from natural causes. He was 100.

Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths. Towering over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s, he founded the school of thought known as structuralism, which holds that common features exist within the enormous varieties of human experience. Those commonalities are rooted partly in nature and partly in the human brain itself.
The rest of the French and English articles can be found at the links.  A more eclectic perspective of his life and work can be found in last year's 100th Anniversary series on this blog.  Thanks PM for the alert. 

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Thinking About How Budget Cuts Are Made

[This is a long post.  I wish I could make these points succinctly, but the issues are complex.  So bear with me.  At least scroll down and look at the headlines.  And gain enough knowledge that you could follow my advice at the bottom and call your assembly member to discuss the budget.  This is a democracy.  You, the citizen, are ultimately responsible if it doesn't work. While this is about Anchorage, the same issues play out everywhere.]


Alaska Morning News' Len Anderson talked with Rene’e Aguilar Monday morning on Alaska Morning News on KSKA.   Rene’e is the Interpersonal Violence Prevention Specialist for the Municipal Department of Health and Human Services, Safety Links Program.  You can listen to the segment here.   The report was about multi-lingual outreach work the DHHS is doing to help victims of domestic violence gain access to information, educational materials, and local resources that can help them while the problem is small.
Sort of like getting people to a doctor when the problem is easily treatable, so they don't have to go to the emergency room later with a much more expensive and debilitating problem. Public Health calls this Prevention!

What the show didn't let you know is that Rene’e’s position is being cut and that DHHS Safety Links Program will not be able to continue to develop and produce public safety materials for vulnerable populations in Anchorage.

This is not a simple issue and I've been struggling with how to write about it. While some details are important to understand, it's really a larger philosophical question. There are various assumptions that lead to totally different approaches here.

1.
Public sector v. private sector - Ronald Reagan came to power on the slogan of "Government is the Problem" and that the private sector was the solution.

After 30 years of private sector solution, we have a health care system that while good in some areas, is essentially full of holes. We have had some our most powerful corporations go bankrupt and require government intervention on the grounds that the upheaval to our society and economy would have been enormous had the auto industry and the financial industry not received massive bailouts. People were lured into houses they couldn't afford leaving some people wealthy and others homeless.  The private sector plays an important role, but it's based on greed as a key motivator. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that's probably not the best of human emotions on which to base a society.

One of the rationales, I'm told, for cuts in the programs at the Health Department is that the private sector can do it better. Well, let's think again. The private sector does not make a profit off of people who can't afford to pay. Passing programs like housing assistance funds from HUD to non-profit groups doesn't work unless you pass on money to pay for people to administer the programs. Besides, social service non-profit organizations live mainly off of grants and other government monies. The same money that governments work off of.  (Sure, there are some non-profits, like Providence, that provide services in competition with private sector companies, but with the advantage of not having to pay taxes.  Their surplus doesn't go to share holders.  It's supposed to go into providing more services, though it can also go to large executive salaries.)

Small social service non-profits  might be able to do things cheaper than government agencies only because their employees rarely get a decent wage or benefits. Some of the executive of larger non-profits may do ok, but the people on the ground, the people who used to work for government agencies before so much was privatized, are just getting by in precarious jobs that could go away anytime. That may make a politician look good because he's passed the costs off to elsewhere and caused people to take big cuts in salary and security, but it has big costs to a community when well trained, educated people have to struggle to make ends meet.


So, for instance, in addition to Rene’e’s position, two other critical positions are being cut.  This is a total of three positions or 60% of the Safety Links Program. These two Emergency Services positions administer Housing and Urban Development and other money that passes through the Municipality to help keep people in their homes. They help people in emergencies with rental assistance, utility assistance, paying security deposits and first month's rent. They help pay utility bills so electricity won't be shut off. These are the kinds of small activities that prevent people from becoming homeless. These positions dispersed $198,082 in such direct emergency services to 498 households between October 2008 and August 2009. This was money that came from federal grants and from Chugach Electric and even the Anchorage Water and Waste Water Utility.

The rationale, I'm told, is that the private sector can do this better.

But others tell me that the non-profits don't want this money because it doesn't include money to pay for people to do all the work needed to disperse this money in a responsible and accountable manner. It requires people to interview applicants, monitor how the money is spent, fill out the documentation that the money was distributed according to the laws and regulations. But the positions to do that work are being cut.

Imagine the outcry if someone who didn't qualify got aid because there wasn't adequate staffing  to monitor how assistance was provided.



2. Individual or Collective Responsibility

Along with the private sector model, we've also been held hostage to the individual responsibility model. I'm not putting down people who take care of their own needs - in the traditional sense, I fit in that category.  I've lived within my means, my kids grew up without getting into any trouble, and they have managed to pay their own way in the world.


But I also recognize the extent to which my family upbringing and my genetic makeup and a good deal of luck gave me the skills and abilities to accomplish that. And like everyone else, I too am vulnerable.  My son's bike accident last May reminded me how vulnerable we all are and how easily we can become incapable of supporting ourselves.  Fortunately, my son was able to return to work, but he was lucky.

I also know that saying people are 'on the dole' because they are too lazy to work, is a self serving story. It gives us individual permission not  to worry about them because it is their own fault. Which ignores the impact on kids of a nurturing home environment compared to  growing up with alcohol, witnessing domestic violence, and having no books at home.  Those of us who group with advantages need to recognize that we didn't do it alone.  And that we do have a responsibility to help those who grew up with severe disadvantages.

In Eastern cultures, there is a much greater understanding of the role that society as a whole plays in whether people are rich or poor, sick or healthy. In the US we want to say that all the credit or blame goes to the individual.

It's this kind of philosophical difference that underlies decisions about where to cut funding.

Of the 3500 or so counted homeless people in Anchorage this year, about half are kids and families. These are people getting some sort of assistance because they are involuntarily not in stable housing. They could be in shelters or they could be couch surfing with friends or relatives. As I've related above, the position for PREVENTION of domestic violence is being cut and two experienced line employees who actually do prevention work are being replaced by two executives who are focusing on cleaning up homeless camps.  To be fair, I don't know the previous experience of the two executives, I haven't seen their job descriptions, so they may be much better prepared to do this work than I realize. 

At least some of that work, I know, has been spurred on by neighbors who, understandably, do not want homeless inebriates around their homes and where their kids play in parks and greenbelts. It is more a police function than prevention function. It's about helping the 'worthy' part of society by punishing the 'unworthy' part of society. The homeless are seen as a problem for the rest of us that needs to be swept under the rug, not as a problem of our society that we all need to work to alleviate.


3.  Budget Cutting Techniques.  I understand that the cuts in the Health Department at the Municipality were made by the director, Diane Ingle, in consultation with her department heads. The Mayor's office didn't tell her which programs to cut, just how much to cut.. Though I don't think the Department asked for the two executive positions for homeless camp work.  I would say that the Health Department has taken so many hits already over the last 15 years that there really isn't any program left that doesn't assist people who are really in need or doesn't protect the health of all of us as public health programs (immunization, clean water, etc.) are supposed to do.  Public health programs have had far greater impact on health improvements than private health care.  According to Whatispublichealth.com:

In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention named the ten greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. These advances have been largely responsible for increasing the lifespan of populations; over twenty-five of the 30 years can be accredited to public health initiatives, while medical advances account for less than 4 years.
There is a bigger question about whether every department in the Municipality is equal. Are there some programs that have less critical functions, whose loss has less impact on vulnerable populations and the general quality of life of Anchorage? If there are, then asking all departments to make cuts without comparison to programs in other departments, while easier for the Mayor, is not a responsible way to make these cuts.  It allows him to say the departments made their own decisions while not really making the more difficult cross departmental choices.  It also takes the option of paying more for Municipal services off the table before we even look at the impacts of the cuts. 


4.  Long range or short range thinking.  This also involves tangible and intangible benefits and costs.  Government, in many cases, when successful, is invisible.  We have come to expect certain things from Government. So we do not notice when things are working.  We tend to notice when things are NOT working.   For example; When our car doesn't bounce because the streets are well maintened; when there's smooth traffic flow with working traffic lights; when there's effective water drainage;  when we can withdraw our money from the ATM without fearing a mugger; when safe and healthy drinking water flows from the tap;  we tend to take these things all for granted and not think of the infrastructure and work required to keep them happening.  It's only when these things are disrupted by potholes, by malfunctioning street lights, by flooded intersections, or our tap water is brown that we notice government.


Just as much of government prevents problems and is reactive only in exceptional circumstances, live is better for us all if we work to  prevent crime rather than to react to it after the fact.  This includes crimes like domestic violence which has an enormous effect on society, because the victims can't go back to their normal safe homes after the crime.  Their homes are the crime scene and this upbringing means these victims disproportionately become problems for all of us because they lack appropriate skills and emotional stability that most of us get and that enable us to be productive members of society.

So government is about preventing things from happening.  And it's hard to measure the things that didn't happen because government was doing its job well - the accidents that didn't happen because the streets were maintained and the traffic lights worked;  the robberies that didn't take place because kids were at recreational  and study programs after school;  the beating a spouse or child didn't get because parenting training and alcohol rehabilitation worked; the planes that didn't crash because the FAA systems worked.  You get the picture.  Government isn't about making a profit, it's about doing those things the private sector can't do.  But that's a different post. 

Prevention of problems is government’s most basic job.  Arresting robbers is a failure to prevent crime in the first place.  But prevention of most societal ills starts with making sure that people grow up in homes, where not only are they NOT abused, but they are positively nurtured.  We can argue about when government agencies should intervene with how someone raises their kids, but there is nothing to debate about whether fetal alcohol syndrome causes lifelong problems for the victims and for society.  Whether kids that were neglected or beaten or sexually abused are much more likely to become dysfunctional adults.  We all pay that price eventually.


But politicians who are elected for two, three, and four year terms, tend to think and act short term.  (Just as businesspeople have become trained to think about the quarterly stock reports instead of five and ten years out.)  The intangible benefits of preventing interpersonal violence, keeping pregnant women from smoking, reading to toddlers, are hard to measure.  This is not simply about poor families either.  Neglect and violence cross economic lines.  But richer people have more cushion and when they do transgress, they can hide it better.

These aren't easy issues to articulate.  To me they seem self-evident.  But to some, I might as well be speaking Farsi.

In a Democracy, we are all culpable.  All of us are ultimately responsible for the decisions our politicians make. Blaming politicians is shirking our responsibility. We are the electors of the politicians. 

We can't just shove the work onto them and not oversee what they do.  In Iran people risked their lives to demonstrate for what they believed.

Can we interrupt our television viewing and internet surfing long enough to do our jobs as citizens?

Call (or text) your Municipal Assembly members. Ask them about the cuts. Ask them what they see as our options. Let them know you think PREVENTION programs that cost a tiny fraction of the Municipal budget and which will lose matching money from other sources SHOULD NOT be cut.

Then call three or five friends and convince them to do the same thing.


Note:  I was first alerted to this issue at the DELTA meetings I attended last Thursday and Friday and then I did some follow up questions.   If I've missed important information, well, this is a blog and you can post what I missed in the comments.

Drug Company Push Poll Against Begich Health Care Proposals

According to Sourcewatch: 
A push poll is where, using the guise of opinion polling, disinformation about a candidate or issue is planted in the minds of those being 'surveyed'. Push-polls are designed to shape, rather than measure, public opinion. 

We just had a phone call poll from "a representative of the drug companies" in which we were told that Sen. Begich is proposing a number of amendments to the health care reform bill which will add considerable costs.  We were then asked if we were opposed to any bill that will increase the price of prescription drugs. 

So, if you get a call like this, pay attention to how they are trying to shape your opinion.

Powerful Alaska Blogs

There are some powerful Alaska blogs out there. One of the most powerful is Peter Dunlap Shohl's Parkinson blog. Here's a bit from today's post. The whole thing is worth reading.

Paths to meaning, salvaging quality of life with PD

Parkinson's Disease is no walk in the park. Unless your park is home to a mysterious debilitating assailant who steals up to you and attempt to slowly rob you of your life. . .

There is financial pain. The meds are not cheap. And if you're lucky enough to have decent insurance where you work, guess what. Parkinson's is likely to take your job, too. The tentative financial security that most of us live with, or are trying to establish goes *poof* with Parkinson's.

It makes a person want to scream. Oh, sorry, more bad news, your voice also goes. Tell you what. Instead of screaming, just whisper loudly. What's that you say? Come again? Oh. Whispering isn't a satisfying substitute for screaming? Not for me either. The line forms here for a literal life of quiet desperation.
 
Much of the post is devoted to a list of eight tips for living with PD .   Well worth reading for everyone. 

Monday, November 02, 2009

This Post is Basically for Bloggers - I'm Testing Blogspot's "new" Editor

[I'm just fiddling around with the new editor. I suspect this will be of little interest to anyone but Blogspot bloggers. And not even to those who have already tried out the updated post editor]


I'm just going to play around here with the new editor.  Actually I'm not sure how new it is, but I just found it.   It's not all that different, but it does have this text background feature that wasn't on the old version.  

Adding pictures is completely different.  It allows you to set the size and location in the post, not in the add image window.  And if I make a mistake, there is now an automated strikeout option.

That was a jump break.  I'm not sure what that does, unless I have a format that just gives an intro to the post and a link to the rest. [I took the jump break out because the post ended here and there was no link for the reader to jump.  I'll have to find out what happened there.]

  1. The add pictures function is no longer available in the edit html mode.  Let's see about lists.
  2. These were always troublesome if you wanted to have sub headings
    1. Ah, much easier.  All I had to do was push tab.
    2. Now let's see how I get out of here.  
Just extra returns until you're out.  How about another picture.  When we got back last week, those pansies were still blooming nicely.   Wow, you can move the pictures around much easier now.  At least up and down.

But you also used to be able to click on a picture and then enlarge it precisely by pulling the corner.  I can't seem to do that here.  [Update: Yes, you can, just double click on the image.]  That's the driveway when we got home last week.  And there's still no snow in town, though the mountains are white. 

One problem I've always had is that if I have pictures on the left and right, they never look the way they will when it actually posts.  Let's see if this solves that. 

If you're using blogspot and haven't tried this new editor, you can get it by going to
  1. Customize
  2. Settings
  3. Basic
Then scroll down to the bottom of the page to Global Settings:



One more things about the new Insert Image tool.  You can put the picture where you want it in the post.  It doesn't just go to the top.  That's something I've wanted for a long time.

I'm doing a presentation on blogging at the Apple User Group Wednesday night.  I can do this because most people, even there, seem to not really know what a blog is.  They've heard about it, but aren't sure what it is.  So I seem like an expert in comparison.  But I'm not sure it's a good thing or bad thing that I discovered this new editor just before I do that.  Oh well.

I realized while I was posting here that I haven't seen the Blogger Buzz website for a long time and that's why I didn't know about the new editor.  Well there's a lot I didn't know about.  It looks like they put the page break in automatically.  So probably this stuff I'm writing here below the page break won't be seen by people who don't do the jump.

And label clouds - I've seen them on people's blogs, but now I see how I can do that if I want. 

And  when I just put in the link for Blogger Buzz above, I found that you can test the link in the link window now.  And there's a way to automatically insert an email link.  You don't have to do the html to do that now.  Here's the link to Blogger's page on "the new post editor."

Google Hits and Misses September/October 2009

I started doing these posts to highlight unusual search terms that got someone to this blog. This evolved into an assessment of how well Google directed someone based on the search terms, but it still has a mix of the two.

Here are two new insights I've gleaned about google search seems to work that I've gotten from this month.

1. Google takes all the terms on 'one page.' On a blog that will depend on how the blogger has set the pages. In my case, a 'page' is a month unless the month has too many posts and runs out of space. I'm assuming this because Google finds terms from unrelated posts and either picks one post to send the searcher to, or the whole page. You can see some examples below where I show what the Google search page showed the searcher.

2. Image searches look at the words in the post as well as the tags on the image. Sometimes this works well, sometimes not.

3. Google is pretty good at figuring out mispellings.




Bulls-eye
karen language hello - This person didn't just get the words for hello in Karen written phonetically, this person got a video tape of a Karen villager in Northern Thailand teaching me how to say hello in Karen. I'd call that a bulls-eye. Now, whether the dialect of Karen spoken in Texas is the same dialect, I can't say.

michael palin book apple seed potato - got to a post on Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. which discusses apples, seeds, and potatoes. I'm impressed how Google can sort through mispellings. Pollan is not related to Palin.

botany of desire - One of the interesting parts of following google hits, is getting a sense that something is happening related to one of the items on your blog. I started getting an increasing number of hits for Botany of Desire as publicity came out about the television show based on the book.

why are professional baseball diamonds different sizes - this person got to a post "Why are baseball diamonds different sizes?" and then to the link to the NPR interview that answered the question. I'd forgotten all about this post. I had to go check the answer too.

grilled sticky rice - And they got a picture of grilled sticky rice in the banana leaf wrapper and a loose recipe as related by the Chiang Mai shopowner.



mountain ask leaf - I'll give Google a bullseye for this one. I'm assuming that the searcher mistyped and so did Google, giving him a picture of mountain ash leaves.





Close

Do spittle bugs have teeth - They got to this post on spittle bugs which shows the spittle, but doesn't discuss teeth.


inside of a banana sketch different sections - This was an image search that got to a picture of cross section of an elephant toe banana.

classical music effects on ice crystals - This was an image search and they got a picture of ice crystals on our storm door at -10˚F (-23˚C). But no music.

used italian ice machine - got to picture of an old Thai ice scraping machine in a post from Chiang Mai. Who knows? Maybe it originally came from Italy.

can't seem to wake up at amrit vela - I can't seem to wake up at the Eiffel Tower in the morning. Sometimes these searches leave me scratching my head only to find I do have something on this that I've totally forgotten. This got to a post on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India where you can find out what amrit vela means. It does make sense after all. Well, actually, instead of giving the specific post, Google gave the whole archive page for October 2006. Again, some of the words come from other posts. So you have to scroll down to Oct. 25.
red & yellow flower pointed upwards indoor plants long stem - got to this picture of a red flower on the trail to Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai, Thailand. BTW, Doi means mountain, Suthep is a type of angel.



snow leopard update blank screen - I got a lot of these, more for 'black' screen. With good reason. I have several posts on my snow leopard problem. Google first took most people to a post I wrote before I had the solution. When I saw this, I did put links in all the posts about the black screen to get them to the cure post. And only some people took that link. By October 10, it seemed that most of these were being sent to the post with the 'cure' at the end of the title. So Google can learn. The number of these searches also confirms that this is inherent in Snow Leopard.



A Stretch -

nice green birds for cage - This was a person from Canada. I can understand wanting to have a nice green bird around, but the idea of putting a bird into a cage for one's entertainment is a little disturbing. I recognize there's a difference between capturing a wild bird and putting it into a cage and getting one born in captivity. But people raise birds to sell only because there are people who want to put them in cages. This person got to a picture of picture of a bird of paradise in the Bird Park in Singapore. It's a very big cage and you can barely see the bird for all the greenery, but it's still in a cage. Sort of like being under house arrest.

rumor of birds in the house - More birds. Not sure what this means exactly, but it got to a post about a bird that flew into our bedroom window and other bird-house incidents.

kenny g is a jehovahs witness - Well, I have posts on Jehovah's witnesses and I have a post on Pat Metheny writing about Kenny G. But nothing that combines the two. There was a surprisingly large number of people googling Pat Metheny on Kenny G.

apple genius josh at apple store santa monica fired - Well, I did go to the Apple Store in Santa Monica and I did spend time at the genius bar, but I don't recall anyone named Josh. Google found all the words in scattered over four posts. The searcher simply got to my blog - not even a specific post.

parking garages hidden inside mountains pictures - This Austrian searcher got a picture of a parking garage in LA, not at all hidden in a mountain. It was way down on the page they got, but since it was an image search, they did get to choose from a page full of pictures.

famous people who were born in dangerous places - Don't know how helpful this was, but it was an interesting search. They got to Famous People Born in 1909.

what ethical obligations do you personally feel towards wolves and whales - Got to a post about an article written about Wales, Alaska. It talked about ethical obligations urban Alaskans have to understanding the history of rural Alaska among other things.



Probably Not Google's Fault

Sometimes searchers give Google a real challenge. What did these people want?

how to make the constitution 1500 papers in photoshop - Who knows what this person was after? Not me. Their search got several posts mashed into one and it linked them to one on a post where I photoshopped a picture I took while cross country skiing. But I put the blame here on the person searching - what was he looking for?

what can i grow that isn't agapanthus - lot's of things I'd venture. Can't blame Google for sending this to a post that mentions agapanthus. This is someone who needs to think about her search terms more carefully.

thyland people are eatting abortion child flash is it true - this query came from someone in India who got to a post on the ethics of publishing photos of children. Google combined Children, people's, flash, eating from several different places on the blog.

photo gull light cloudy sky new york city airport - Was this person looking for a specific picture or a picture with all those things? Since this was an image search the searcher presumably got lots of pictures to look at. But this one had no gull, was not New York City or even an airport. But It did have clouds and blue sky. The post it was in mentioned the Santa Monica Airport. I've started to notice - now that I can usually see the image search terms - that Google considers not only the terms in the photo file name, but also terms in the post as well.

does human nature exists in everyone - Now this is an interesting question. I've never directly addressed this question, but the searcher got directed to the post on why everyone should study philosophy.

how much wild salmon 28 weeks pregnant - What was this person looking for? How much she could eat at 28 weeks? How long salmon are pregnant? She got a post on the difference between wild, farmed, and hatchery salmon.

last year when it snowed for eight days complete sentence? - Not completely sure what the searcher wanted. Whether his words were a complete sentence? I'm guessing it was a school assignment and he had to complete the sentence. The google hit combined several posts and had the word snow. The post was about the president-elect breaking with tradition by using complete sentences when he talked.



You Missed This One Google


Most of these are Google trying too hard to come up with something. Google has trouble saying, "I can't find anything" and maybe that's ok. People find things they didn't know they were looking for.


mango 21 44000
- There's 44,000 in one post. mango in another. And 21 in the google search information. But I don't think this was what the German searcher was looking for.

What Do I know?: 44000 (NYE) at Alaska Women Against Palin ... - [ Diese Seite übersetzen ]
13 Sep 2008 ... That would be like having 44000 people rally in New York City, 20800 in LA, or 15350 in Chicago. ... I can see the mango and sticky rice, but I can't reach it. But I'll learn. ..... 21 hours ago ...
www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/.../44000-nye-at-alaska-women-against-
palin.html -
Im Cache - Ähnlich

wat do they mean when they say the the duty of the beast in flesh by a split second - Maybe I should have a category of "Searcher goofed." Google found some posts that had some of words. But they weren't all one posts and ultimately I doubt they answered whatever question the searcher had. Here's what Google gave him that got him to this blog:

What Do I know?: January 2008

Jan 5, 2008 ... Yes, despite the flesh in the ADN promo article, it's fine for kids ...... 666, the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast Who is the Antichrist .... Whatever they say is calculated. Truth is a strategic choice, ..... Just because one has the legal right to do something doesn't mean they should do it. ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html - Cached - Similar -
I'm surprised they didn't find 'wat' too.


Should Google have some sort of minimum standard of words being together in a single post? While the bots can find the words really fast, it seems it still takes a human to say, "This is gibberish."

Or is this some sort of internet beach combing and people are just curious about what they might find? The collection of posts Google offered are all from one archived month. I think this is what I've seen before for what seems like random words collected from different posts. If that's accurate, then they have limited the searches to some identified 'page'. Thus they found a single 'page' that had the most words on it, though for a blog that means lots of generally unrelated posts.
Perhaps it would be more meaningful on a regular website page. Perhaps they should have a filter for blogs.

what does moosegoose look like - Let me know if you find out. Google gave them a post titled "Moose, Goose Lake, UAA Science Building" I got another one about moosegoose as October ended.

molar tooth - The searcher got a picture (this was image search) of growing tamarind from seed. But it tells us a bit about how the image search works. In the text I mention that the seeds are about the size of a molar tooth. So Google is checking out the words in the text around the picture. This one clearly missed completely.


Does Google have a Sense of Humor?

money saving shopkeeper expert - This image search got to a picture labeled "Buddha Image Shopkeeper Chiang Mai." The picture is of a shop that sells Buddha Images.


Sunday, November 01, 2009

Chinese Opera Comes to Anchorage


The first time I saw Chinese Opera was sometime in 1967 or 1968. I was teaching English at the Boys High School in Kamphaengphet, Thailand and the Chinese community had hired a group from Singapore to perform for some special occasion. There was a trailer that converted into a stage that was set up in a public area in town. The folding chairs were set out for the members of the Chinese community who sponsored the opera. The rest of the town could stand behind the chairs and watch. In a small town like that I got to visit backstage and meet with the actors. [I started this on Saturday and turned the house upside down trying to find some pictures of that first encounter with Chinese opera. In vain. But when I find them one day, I'll post them. This picture here is from UAA's website.]

Chinese opera is like asparagus. It's an acquired taste that requires small samples over time. I've had various opportunities over the years, to see bits and pieces of Chinese opera. Several more times in Thailand. Then when we lived in Hong Kong for a year, at the night market there were always small groups of actors/singers who would perform a scene or two on the street.


In China, Chinese opera was on television every night and once when I was there for a conference they took us to a performance for tourists. It was interesting because they explained things in English and they only showed short scenes. I'm sure the tourist agencies had discovered that most tourists couldn't last through too much Chinese opera. Besides the fact that it is all in a foreign language, the screechy singing and scratchy sounds of the stringed instruments, well, that's the part that takes getting used to.

Now it's a relatively familiar sound that brings back good memories.But I'm confident that at this performance they will give short glimpses of different operas with English explanations so that it should be easier for novices to understand what is happening.

So, come Tuesday, November 3, 2009

UAA's Wendy Williamson Auditorium
7pm (doors open at 6:30) Free!

Well, nothing is free. This is offered by the Confucius Institute at UAA. As I've said in an earlier post, this is sponsored by the Chinese government to promote Chinese language and culture around the world. And people speculate less savory agendas, but no more, I'm sure, than the US and other governments promote with their cultural outreach into other countries. If the Confucius Institute is merely a cultural exchange or a branch of the Chinese takeover of the world*, your taking this opportunity won't have much of an impact on their agenda, but you'll get to experience an art form that has been around for a thousand years or more. [*I'm mostly joking. Even if the worst fears about Confucius Institutes as outposts to monitor overseas Chinese is true, they will play only the tiniest role in China's increasingly important role in the world. And if you take the threat seriously, consider this an opportunity to get to know your enemy.]

The UAA website has a detailed description of the scenes they will be playing so I encourage you to visit that, even print out some of the descriptions before you go. If you take kids, and by all means do, letting them act out the scenes before you go would be great preparation. Let them watch some Chinese Opera videos on line (there are two below). The makeup and the costumes will be spectacular. I think kids can relate to the music better than adults who already have formed notions of what proper music is.

The first video looks like a Chinese television show about modern kids who are studying Chinese Opera. It's all in Chinese, but it shows practicing, putting on makeup, some performances. I think kids can relate to other kids even if it isn't in English. If they don't like this one, find another one and let them dance to the music and play one or two of the scenes described on the UAA website. They'll be a lot more interested when they see the real thing.






From the Illuminated Lantern, a site that reviews Asian movies, I've excerpted this description of the form of Chinese opera, but the whole piece, which is a description of the historic forms of Chinese opera is well worth a peek.

Although there are many different regional styles, they all share many similarities. Each have the same four role types: the female, the male, the painted-face, and the clown. Performances consist of singing, poetry, music, dance, and gesture. Emphasis is on costume and makeup rather than props or scenery. The operas often tell the same stories, though with various regional differences, such as alternate endings or additional characters. The information described within this article will, unless otherwise noted, pertain to Peking Opera specifically, and the regional operas more generally.


We can see four roles here in this description of one of the pieces to be presented Tuesday (from the UAA website.)

Autumn River 京剧《秋江》片段

This story happened during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). Scholar Pan Bizheng is staying with his aunt at a Taoist temple when he falls in love with the Taoist nun Chen Miaochang. His aunt finds out and forces him to leave his love behind and go to Beijing to take the imperial examination. When Chen Miaochang learns that Pan is leaving, she runs to the bank of the Autumn River and hires an old fisherman to follow him. The two meet on the road, travel to Beijing and get married.
The role of Chen Miaochang is played by Hua Shan.


Clearly Scholar Pan is the male role and Taoist nun Chen is the female role. I'm guessing the old fisherman is the clown and that leaves the aunt as the painted face, but I'm just guessing.

Don't miss this. Bring the kids. Sit as close as you can or bring binoculars. And since it's free, if you tire quickly, you can leave without feeling you've lost your money. And you'll forever be able to say you've seen Chinese Opera live, and if you're lucky, you'll get hooked.

If you've never heard it before, it is a bit of a shock to Western ears, so check out this video of Teochew dialect opera (the kind I first heard in Thailand) so it will be a bit familiar when you come Tuesday night. This is from yeohts8192289 at Veoh, he's from Penang, Malaysia.




Saturday, October 31, 2009

"The Air Conditioned class has very little in common with the sweating masses"

A Muslim friend from that part of the world emailed me a link to the recent NY Times article about the CIA employing Afghan President Karzai's brother and prefaced it with these comments:

How simply it works: pay a collaborator to keep the insurgency going so that the issue is alive (central asian energy, China / Russia encirclement ...) and the new Great Game is played at the cost of 600 American lives this year alone... And you need not pay for the insurgency which sustains itself from the opium trade. The Taliban insurgency legitimises the West's occupation of and war on the poor of Afghanistan.
What this story points to is what's going on in Pakistan. The Military top brass and the political elite are in cahoots with the likes of CIA, et al whose agenda for the region they have adopted as their own in exchange for $1.5 billion a year [the actual amount is substantially more, of course]. The Air Conditioned class has very little in common with the sweating masses and have no choice other than be the accomplice of the ruling clique. That in essence is what is going on there.
[Note: I asked my correspondent what was meant by "war on the poor of Afghanistan" and the response is at the end of this post.]

We'd already had glimpses of that relationship in Pakistan in George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War. If you saw the movie, that was more like musical comedy whereas the book was a very readable, but also well researched and fact rich look into what happened in the 1980s. For some other sources on this topic see Tomdispatch which makes my point about the movie, but stronger:
Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War.


The Times story begins like this:

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.

By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
Published: October 27, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House...
For the whole Times article go here.



Response to the question about "war on the poor":

What I meant by the "war on the poor" is the simple statistic provided by some international article: $233 billion on the war effort and $1.5 b.on humanitarian aid. In the last three days, Hillary has changed her ways and actually engaged with the people of Pakistan by visiting a saint's shrine and engaging with students at a university rather than returning after talks with the President. She has dished out a billion dollars in Pakistan over three days (already committed but symbolically given out at universities and the like).
What I mean by the war on poor is that "collateral damage" is almost always the poor. The drones and their super efficient missiles rarely ever kill the rich. The immoral leaders of our wretched land have such rosy lives ...even in their death they have tens of doctors to let their soul out softly. Robert Mugabe is said to have a team of Chinese doctors permanently settled in Harare to give him aphrodisiacs at age 86.
As a former Finance Minister of Pakistan (and a great intellectual at Columbia Mahboobul Haq whose Poverty Curtain was akin to the drawing of the Iron or the Bamboo curtain across the developing world) once remarked privately (and told to me personally by the Minister's teacher): "Sacrifices are always paid by the poor...and thanks God I am not poor)
While million dollar tanks or hummers roll by and while the million dollar planes bomb the hell out of all, the poor have no running water or sanitation...
So all wars are essentially against the poor whose leaders are already on the payroll of the UFOs. [Unidentifiable Foreign Organization.]
At the end of the day, the world is about winners and losers. Someone makes money at the expense of the others. Although I espouse an abundance mentality (i.e. that there is enough for all of us if we just shared it fairly), the human race is about a hundred or so Warren Buffets controlling so much wealth that it exceeds many national economies. This imbalance means that someone's wealth comes at someone else's expense. Every time that a Nike shoe is bought in the US, Nike and Wallmart make x number of dollars to add to their overflowing tills (their shareholders make money) - but do the Indonesians or the Pakistanis who produce those shoes get a fair deal - or for that matter do the Wallmart employees get a better rate because their employer is better off. No their wages are determined by that immensely creative contraption of Mr. Adam Smith: the invisible hand of the market. As someone said, a sucker is born every minute: so for every fat banker there a thousand "sub-primes" and their foreclosures who have paid for flabby middle parts.
Empires are not built form nothing. In past ages they were built from the blood and bones of the vanquished, now while the poor buggers remain alive they continue to provide producers with their muscles and captive markets. [You must have heard of the Fair Trade Label whose coffee is five times more expensive than the Maxwell House on our tables ..because they pay Ethiopian traders five times what the MNCs [MultiNational Corporations] pay].
In the process of creation and consumption of wealth, some people create more than they can consume and others have to consume more than they can produce - i..e they are too poor to provide for two meals. What happens to that wealth? They invest to make it produce more wealth ...from where.
Money is not created out of thin air. So when the US spends on Mr. Karzai to get results it wants, Mr. Karzai also goes out to make his money - from whom. The drug lords who make their money from the addicts of Kabul - and New York. Technically, these addicts are rational actors but are they really? What about learned helplessness of the slaves - now called African Americans.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Highway to Highway Comments due Friday, October 30, 2009

October 30, 2009 is today. How many of you have been to one of the meetings that shows all the options? The ADN had a front page story with rough maps of their seven options today, but what do we actually know?

Rep. Les Gara wrote at Alaska Dispatch a week ago:
Lots of you are justifiably scared that state, city and private traffic planners have, well, gone loopy on us. It's time for some straight talk about threats you've heard that traffic experts would actually build a new highway through Anchorage's densest neighborhoods, and maybe even through your kitchen.

Here's the skinny. These folks aren't necessarily nuts. They're just messing with you. The National Environmental Policy Act probably requires them to pretend they are considering completely insane highway route alternatives through Anchorage that, from the mail I'm receiving, have scared the bejesus out of many of you. What they haven't told you is that most of their proposed route alternatives have almost no chance of moving forward.



I've been out of town for the last three weeks so I've only seen what it says on the website. But I'd like to add a couple more options:

Option 8: Just forget the link and use the money to improve other forms of transportation to make walking, biking, and taking the bus more feasible for commuters.

and

Option 9: This is going too fast. I haven't had time to get to one of the meetings and the website isn't clear. Push this back a couple of months and let more people get involved.

The goal, to alleviate Anchorage traffic by allowing vehicles to bypass surface streets in town, sounds reasonable. But if it means a freeway cutting through established neighborhoods or large urban parks like Russian Jack, it may not be worth it. We need to have some creative thinking that establishes a solution that works fifty years from now, not something that maybe made sense fifty years ago when no one ever heard of global climate change and gas was 25 cents a gallon.


But today is the deadline. So you if you don't know what the implications are, you could cut and paste Option 9 into an email to let them know there are people out there who haven't been to the meetings but still are concerned. Here's the address:

contact@highway2highway website.

Here's their website

Here's the Anchorage Citizens Coalition site which offers alternative ideas. But you have to send in your comments today.

Korea's Anonymous Blogger Guru

An article in Slate tells the story of a Korean nobody who anonymously became an economic blogger guru. The story also reminds us that different countries have different levels of democracy.

Until the day he was outed, the most influential commentator on South Korea’s economy lived the life of a nobody. Park Dae-Sung owned a small apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of Seoul and freelanced part-time at a telecom company. Thirty years old, he still hoped to earn a four-year degree in economics. In the mornings, he would bicycle to the public library to study for the university entrance exam. His standard uniform was slacks, loafers, and wrinkle-free button-down shirts, as though he were going to work in an office. But with his slightly chubby moon face, glasses, and neatly parted hair, he easily blended in among the rows of students. While they worked through school assignments, he immersed himself in the text of his chosen profession. . .

Then, in March 2008, Park opened an account on South Korea’s popular Daum Agora forum. Here, he decided, he would call himself Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom, and write exclusively on economics, drawing on both public reports and his years in the stacks poring over Adam Smith and Joseph Stiglitz. Affecting the effortless command of a seasoned investor, he strove to project the authority that had eluded him in real life. The world economy is in the midst of collapse, he warned, so pay your debts and stock up on noodles and drinkable water. He made pronouncements on when to buy or sell a home, exchange Korean won for dollars, and pull out of the financial markets altogether.

As the financial crisis deepened, events confirmed Minerva’s prophecies all too terribly. By early fall, each new dispatch would rise into Daum Agora’s top five headlines, carried by a tide of user votes and drawing hundreds of thousands of pageviews. South Korea’s daily press began publicizing Minerva’s predictions and speculating about his identity. The more the newspapers tried to pierce the veil of Minerva, the more their readers devoured his posts, until it seemed the goddess was giving marching orders to the entire economy. . .

The rest is at the Slate link. A much shorter April 21, 2009 NY Times article fills in a little more. The story raises questions about being anonymous, about people believing anonymous bloggers, about outing anonymous bloggers, about privacy of internet accounts, and a number of other issues.