Spenard Jazz Fest - Poetry and Dance Night Thursday

Sitting in the Organic Oasis was like beiing into another world.  Musicians, poets, dancers, and their friends were gathered.  I would say the performances varied greatly in quality, but the vibe of the evening was comfy, warm,  and I was impressed with all the work people had done to put the evening together.  We saw some people we knew and made new friends as well. 

After the post on the lack of women's voices in the media the other day, I've been much more conscious of whether I've got the camera on men or women. I do have to say that sometimes leaving a picture or video clip out is a favor. But that's because I'm not doing a good enough job with the camera.

The video will give a pale sense of things.  It sounds much less on the video than it did in person.







The Spenard Jazz Fest continues Saturday.  From their website:

Sat June 09
Jazz at the Market | SPENARD FARMER’S MARKET  | 10 am – 2 pm
Free
Stop by the Festival booth for some live music, free refreshments and tons of cool SJF merchandise!
Plus other SJF surprises! You never know what could happen at the market or who you’ll discover.
.

“Altered Arts” Jazzy Mural Painting | BLAINE’S  |  10 am – 6 pm
Free
Time for the annual mural painting at Blaines.
SJF band stand to be filled with an array of local jazz heroes


Originals {Day 2} | ORGANIC OASIS | 4pm – Late
$15/$10 (student/senior/youth)  | Punch Card
Come out for the new music! Great artists, great food, great atmosphere.
4pm: Phil Beckett
5pm: Alex Cruver trio
6pm: Elite 9
7pm: Lee Pulliam
8pm: John Damberg
9pm: Tyler Desjarlais
10pm: Phil Knowlton
.

Bear Tooth Valet Parking for Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Bicycle Commuters of Anchorage (BCA) had free valet parking for bikes at the Bear Tooth last Monday.  (But they did take donations.)

We were there to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi - part of the Alaska Food Film Fest.  




This was a long, but thought-provoking movie about what the movie touts as the greatest sushi maker in Japan.  At 85 he's still making sushi at his restaurant where reservations must be made at least a month in advance.  He's got three Michelin stars.  And his two sons are working for him.  The younger son has opened his own restaurant, but the older son, over 60 now, is still waiting to take over from his father.

Two Screenshots from Jiro Dreams of Sushi Trailer

Jiro left home as a child and made his way to this position.  So clearly he didn't have much of a model for how to father. 

This film is one more case study for us to ponder the sacrificing of personal life to become 'the best' of something.  He says he left for work before his kids were up in the morning and got back when they were already sleeping.  But he has had his son's working for him for 40 years.  But as depicted in the film, he is clearly the boss, even with his sons are old enough to grandfathers.  Is perfect sushi that important?

I did wonder at one point why the Alaska Center for the Environment was sponsoring this movie.  But then Jiro talked about how good fish are disappearing and the importance of sustainable fishing. 

I think the movie could be edited.  But overall it introduced me to the world of a Tokyo restaurant and the now common worldwide food known as sushi.

And so we found ourselves headed toward Yamato Ya for a little sushi after the movie.

We got a mix of sushi and sashimi.

For the photographically curious, I'm using Aperture now (instead of iPhoto) and I experimented with curves on the first and third images here.

What Percent Of People Quoted On Women's Issues In Print Are Women?

A friend sent this link from 4thEstate.  

They are looking at 2012 election coverage and how many women are quoted compared to men.    And since we've been hearing about the gender gap in the Presidential race, it would seem to mean that coverage, of at least that race if not many others, is badly skewed. 

It's particularly telling how men are the predominant commenters on issues like abortion, birth control, etc.  It makes me wonder about my own blog.  How many of the sources I cite are male or female generated?  In a lot of cases I just don't know.

A quick look at my Viddler videos shows a lot more male than female subjects.  I didn't count, but I clearly need to pay more attention to the balance. 

They discuss methodology but I don't understand enough to know how to check it.  But even if their data is off by 10%, the imbalance is staggering.  But given my own gender gap here (at least in the videos) I suspect they are pretty accurate.

Guided Venus Transit in Anchorage at UAA

I'd been hearing the stories, but wondering if Alaska would have a good view and how to watch without burning my eyeballs. It's been cloudy so we probably wouldn't see anything anyway. But I saw an announcement that telescopes and viewing glasses would be available on the garage roof behind the Integrated Sciences building at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Alaska and Hawaii are the only two states where the whole transit would be visible.  We're west enough that the sun wouldn't set before it was finished. And it was sunny.  And I had a nearby viewing spot with experts to guide me.  How could I not go?   But better go before it clouds over. (There were thin clouds, but I think you could see it the whole time.)  Told a friend to go and grabbed a neighbor who was reading in the sun.

There was a variety of telescopes - from the University and from local astronomy buffs.    I got there a little before midpoint.  There was a line to look into the fattest telescope.  People guessed they were there because there was a line.  Someone else suggested that 'bigger is better.'  The other telescopes didn't have lines.  And there were different ways to see Venus crossing the sun.

If you look closely you can see the dot that's Venus in the upper left and lower right images.   Here's another view with Physics/Astronomy post-doc Michelle Wooten answering people's questions.

Venus is the black dot near the bottom of the sun here.  With the telescopes that didn't show the sun directly, the images were flipped over.  Venus was actually going across the top.

Here I put my camera into the eyepiece of a telescope. (The telescope had a dark filter on it so people wouldn't hurt their eyes.)  The dot of Venus is near the top.

Then we went to the planetarium nearby to hear a talk on the phenomenon we were watching live.

I forgot to check the program at the door when I left to get the astronomer's name and I couldn't find a program with names on the UAA website.  Sorry. [UPDATE June 7:  Dr. Andy Puckett, the Planetarium Director and an Asst Prof of Astronomy at UAA introduced himself in a comment below.  Thanks, Andy!]  In the brief video below he shows Venus transiting across the sun and talks about the four contact points - as Venus first touches the sun from the outside, as it touches the edge from the inside, then after crossing the sun, as it touches the edge from the inside (third contact) and from the outside (fourth contact.)  The video ends when he says, now I'll tell you why this is important.

It's important, he goes on to say, because by measuring this transit time from different places on earth, by calculating the small differences in time of the four contact points, you can calculate the distance Venus is from the sun.  He asked us all to stick our arms out with our thumbs up and to close one eye as we put our thumb over some object.  Then switch eyes.  There's a jump and if you know the distance between your eyes, you can calculate the distance to the object.  I remember back to geometry being amazed at the ways you could figure out the third side of a triangle and I think that's what this does.

He also pointed out that when scientists went around the world to watch the second (1761) and third (1769) known transits (a couple of  people saw in 1639) there was no photography yet and the best time keepers were grandfather clocks with pendulums.  So they took grandfather clocks to keep track of time. 

This was a neat illustration on the ceiling of the planetarium.  It shows, if I understood this right, the orbit of Venus (the circle), the sun (the orange dot in the center) and the location of the earth (the blue 'earth'). Actually there are two earth locations - one on the upper left and one in the lower right (harder to see).  These would be on opposite sides of the earth's orbit around the sun.  There's a point on each side of Venus' orbit, where Venus lines up between the earth and the sun so that a transit is visible.  The white lines bounced back and forth to show where Venus would be in relation to the earth.  I think he said 13 orbits of Venus for every eight of earth.  So Venus hits the sweet spot, then misses for eight years, then hits it again.  Then it's over 100 years before it hits it again.

There are lots of places online where you can get more details.  Here's a site that looks at the history of sightings of Venus transits.  

State Buys Nino's Italian Eatery

I passed through Nino's parking lot yesterday on the way to the Bear Tooth.  Being on a bike means you go slower and you can see things you'd miss in a car.  They looked seriously closed, but I didn't have time to stop.  But on the way home I checked more closely.

Why would the State Department of Transportation own this?  Did they owe the State money?  Maybe the state is going into the restaurant business?  Weird.

When I got home it was too late to call anyone, but I did google.  There's a thread in city-data Anchorage on Where did Nino's go?  but no answers.

So this morning I called Nino's phone number.  Busy.




Then I called the Department of Transportation and Public Facitilities and within a few seconds I got the answer.

Nino's was for sale and DOT bought it because it is near where they will be doing work in the future (New Seward and 36th) and they feel they got it for a reasonable price.

They are working on the New Seward Highway from Tudor to Dowling  this summer and next, so it will be at least a couple of years before they start to seriously work at 36th.  I wonder if they would rent it out to a restauranteur in the meantime? 


[UPDATE April 28, 2014:  Here's a picture of the Nino's lot I took today.]

417

I recently had a contest here to see who could come closest to counting the number of dandelions I picked last week.  The underlying intent of the post was to also to poke a little fun at our recent municipal election.  People were more interested in the dandelions.  Nan Mundy guessed there were 390 dandelions in the bag.  That was the closest guess to the actual number I counted when I picked them: 417 - buds, blossoms, and spent blossoms.

Thanks to the others who participated. Nan is someone from Anchorage who has moved to Juneau.  Someone I 'know of' more than I know.  I've notified her and we're working out a dinner at Thai Kitchen when she's in Anchorage next.  No one claimed the bag of dandelions.

CREW Synopsis of DOJ Documents on Don Young

This posts builds from Cliff Groh's post at Alaska Political Corruption that cites Charlie Savage's New York Times' May 31 article about the Public Integrity Section's (PIN) checkered record of late. PIN's the Justice Department branch that prosecuted the Alaska corruption cases, including the Stevens case, and the John Edward's case, but dropped their case against Don Young. It also includes links to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's (CREW) report on the documents it got through Freedom of Information Act requests from DOJ regarding Don Young.

First, here are the excerpts from the Charlie Savage article that mention Young:

The two failed cases were the most nationally visible efforts in recent years by the public integrity section, which was criticized in 2010 after closing out, without bringing charges, a series of long-running investigations into current or former members of Congress including Senator John Ensign of Nevada and Representatives Tom DeLay of Texas, Jerry Lewis of California, Allan B. Mollohan of West Virginia and Don Young of Alaska. . .

“The cases that they are deciding to prosecute, and not prosecute, reflect an incoherent strategy,” she said. “At some points they are willing to be incredibly aggressive, like with John Edwards, and on the other hand they are overly cautious in refusing to prosecute people like John Ensign and Don Young.” 

. . . Mr. Smith, seeking a fresh start for the unit, urged prosecutors to file charges or close cases in which investigations had lingered. The wave of closed cases — including the decision in August 2010 not to charge Mr. Young, another Alaska Republican — led critics to accuse the section of being gun-shy. . . 

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington later sued the Justice Department to obtain documents related to the Young investigation. This spring, it obtained a draft indictment showing that investigators considered charging him with so-called honest services fraud for accepting and expecting a stream of trips, meals, golf outings and other items of value from lobbyists in exchange for official actions like meetings, letters and legislation. 

Savage goes on to say that  "honest services fraud" had been greatly limited by the Supreme Court in Enron's Jeff Skilling case and that Congress hadn't taken action to  restore its scope. 


Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has a synopsis (which Alaska Political Corruption links) of what the PIN investigation of Young produced.   Here are some excerpts of their findings. [I've left in the footnotes]

Over the course of three years, the FBI, with assistance from U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, interviewed dozens of witnesses and amassed a wealth of evidence concerning not only Rep. Young’s role in the Coconut Road earmark, but his misuse of campaign funds to finance personal expenses of both himself and his wife Lu Young. The two used Rep. Young’s campaign account as a personal piggy bank they reached into to cover such things as personal travel home to Alaska,2 restaurants unrelated to campaign activities, and laundry and dry cleaning.3    According to at least one witness, Rep. Young treated any travel to Alaska as campaign related, regardless of its purpose.4    Both he and his wife routinely obtained $300 cash advances for their trips to Anchorage to cover tips and incidental expenses, a practice eventually stopped on the advice of counsel.5    One witness described cash left for Rep. Young either in his hotel room or his condominium.6    Lu Young also sought reimbursement from campaign funds
[1 Young Document 2 (references are to the bates numbers on the documents produced by the FBI).  2 See, e.g., Young Document 192. 3 Young Document 193. 4 Young Document 194. 5 Young Document 195.   6 Id. ]

for additional expenses incurred during trips to Alaska, such as lunches with friends.7    In addition, Rep. Young kept a sports utility vehicle parked in the congressional garage for which he sought monthly reimbursement from campaign funds for mileage, even though the vehicle apparently never left the garage.8
Witnesses interviewed by the FBI paint a fairly negative picture of Rep. Young’s wife Lu, who perceived herself to be “the elected official,” but also acted as a kind of office manager, screening people who came into Rep. Young’s office.9    Described as having “a sense of entitlement about most things,” she submitted many of her personal expenses for reimbursement from campaign funds, including meals with friends and family.10    This practice apparently stopped at some point after years of abuse on the advice of counsel.11    Another witness told the FBI Lu Young received “countless bracelets and ivory while in the DC office,” as well as diamond earrings during a Las Vegas trip,12 while another described Rep. Young and his wife as the recipients of lavish gifts.13

Travel to the Youngs’ two houses in Fort Yukon, Alaska, was covered in large part by campaign funds. The campaign typically paid half of the cost of a charter flight to Fort Yukon, with the congressional office picking up the rest of the cost, which it attributed to Lu Young.14    In some instances, however, the campaign paid for the entire cost of the chartered flight.15    The Youngs also used these flights to transport building supplies.16    Even though these trips were paid for with campaign funds, no campaign events ever took place in Fort Yukon.17
On multiple occasions, Rep. Young went on hunting trips to various hunting resorts in New
[7 Id. 8 See id. 9 Young Document 193. 10 Young Document 194. 11 Young Document 193. 12 Young Document 198. 13 Young Document 250. 14 Young Document 196. 15 Id. 16 Id. 17 Id.]

York, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana paid for with campaign funds.18    In some instances, these trips coincided with campaign trips, but the hunting trips themselves were not campaign events.19    In at least one instance, a planned fund raising event was never held, but the hunting trip still went forward.20
Rep. Young failed to disclose these hunting trips on his annual financial disclosure forms. On August 17, 2010, DOJ’s Public Integrity Section referred this matter to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct on August 17, 2010, for possible violations of the Ethics in Government Act.21    Apparently the House Ethics Committee already had commenced its own investigation, as the referral memo references the fact Rep. Young, through counsel, had previously provided the documentation regarding these trips to the committee.22

 The whole document is here.  

This four page synopsis appears to be based on the documents CREW received through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  You can see the requests and Department of Justice (DOJ) responses here.  First are the requests.  The responses are at the bottom of page one and top of page two.

Blog Quality Standards, Blog Maintenance, and Blog Fatigue

This blog was begun as an experiment and has continued as a labor of love.  It's become an acceptable excuse to spend my time pursuing whatever tickles my brain.  For the most part, spending quality time with my brain and the blog, is stimulating and occasionally seems to add some value to the world at large.

But at times I find that my self imposed schedule (at least once a day) and content standards (see below) cause me tension. Thus, a little blog self reflection is a way to

• think through what is important here  
• share thoughts with other bloggers facing similar issues
• let readers see behind the scenes,  and 
• stall for time.

What do I think my content standards are these days?  (As I write that I'm thinking there are earlier posts where I tried to do this.  And that's one of the problems with blogging today - I have higher standards for myself.  I'm tempted to go back and compare my current standards with the old ones.  No, stop.  That's overkill.  Do this one now, then maybe later, compare them.)  I have these battles with myself constantly.  Less work doesn't usually win like it did just now.  Let me try to articulate my present content standards:

Types of Content

• Mostly self-generated material  -  I should be posting my own original work in most posts.  It would be interesting to go back and see what percent of my posts are mainly original.
• Enhanced borrowed material  - This leads to the question of where do I draw the line between borrowed and original?  
• A movie or book review is original if it focuses on the review with, possibly, some clips or passages, from the original work.  Or an idea from a news article should lead to either my own thoughts or other added meaning such as an overview of what a lot of people thought about the topic.  The original part could include the synthesizing of facts or opinion from various sources including a description of my analytic process.
• More value than just reposting other people's work as filler  - Even if I just find a great idea or video or a picture from somewhere else, I should explain why its important to me to post. The percent of such posts should also be low, maybe once or twice a month at best.  These should be posted either because I found something I thought remarkable and/or that would lift people's spirits.  Sometimes I save things like this for a day when I don't have time to write anything.
• It's ok to plug something I really like - But not just because they asked me to, or even worse, because I'm getting paid (in the broadest sense) for posting.  And all such promotion should identify any connections I have with the person or organization you are promoting.
• Don't post something just to boost hits - Posting a topic only because I know it will boost my ratings is something I don't consciously do.  I've learned to be aware that some topics will get more attention and I have debates with myself about my motives before I post.

I don't think it's necessary to set percentage goals for each type.  General terms like 'most'
and not too often are good enough.  

Content Quality

• Originality - There's very little that hasn't been said before.  One of the brutal tasks of academic writing is making sure no one has written what you are writing.  I don't have that high a standard here.  I do tend to google around to find out what others have said.  My standard seems to be that I'm writing what is original in my experience and if I knowingly get ideas from somewhere else, I'll cite and link them. 
• Respect and Fairness - I try (note I don't claim any particular level of success) to treat the people I write about with respect and fairness.  This means I force myself to think about them as human beings, as people who have parents and children and are struggling to find a way to their own self-respect in a challenging world.  I try to see how the situation looks from their vantage point. That doesn't mean I can't raise questions about their actions, and even their intent, but I constantly remind myself that I really cannot know what they were thinking.  I can only infer.  Raising questions rather than making declaratory statements seems safer.  Would I want someone writing about me the way I'm writing about them?  The qualifications necessary to accurately express how little we truly know about the world can slow down the pace and dim the sparkle of good prose. Can, but doesn't have to.
• Good Prose - This is a goal, often compromised by (self-imposed) deadlines and late night writing.  Strunk and White are my practical guides to succinctness.  They remind me to seek solid nouns and verbs. . . . but, I'm afraid I'm usually in too great a hurry.  Oh, dear.  Time waits for no word.  For particularly sensitive posts, I'll proof and proof and proof to be as clear as possible and avoid unnecessarily offending readers.  For most posts, I've come to realize, I'm scribbling notes to myself that I might be able to use in something later on.  But almost nothing here is a first draft.  Many have been played with five or ten times or more before I hit the publish button.  But I'm still appalled at how many typos manage to slip through.
• Process and Self-Awareness - My inspiration comes from British novelists such as Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Anthony Trollope (Barchester Towers), and Charles Dickens. [I never realized how much influence that British Novels class would have on me.] All of these writers chat directly with their readers behind their characters' backs. They talk about how they are writing the book and about what's going on in their characters' lives. They make process into substance.  I've already done a post on Dickens' discussion of meandering at the beginning of David Copperfield.

These are standards that I find myself striving to meet.  I'm not prescribing them for other bloggers. And I make no claims to how often or how well I achieve them, but they're what I'm aiming at. [I never bought into the prohibition against dangling participles.]


Blog Maintenance

Sometimes I think of my blog as an attic for ideas.  Just write them up as they come and shove them into the blog.  But even though the structure of a blog makes it easier to find things, there is a need to do some maintenance now and then.

• Keeping the Pages Up-to-Date - The "Page" tabs on top make it possible to give readers an easier way to find posts on some topics.  My Redistricting Page, for example, lists all the posts on redistricting, but I'm still a few posts behind.  
• Updating Old Posts - Occasionally, through Sitemeter, I see that someone has gone to an old post and I check it out and find it needs fixing. 
• Fixing errors -  If I find typos, I have no problem with fixing them without calling attention to the change.  That holds true if I clean up the writing by eliminating an unnecessary word or two.  
• Fixing Content - But if I'm changing the content or meaning, then I need to let people know I've made a change and when.  I try to use strikeout and [brackets] to show what's but changed. 
• Fixing missing pictures or bad links - For some reason, some pictures stop working.  These are glaring.  Links are harder to check, but as I write this I remember some tool for checking if your old links are bad.  I haven't tested this out.  It's for Blogspot blogs.  But google will find others. 
• Updates - I don't think I have any obligation to update old posts, there are just too many, but sometimes it just makes sense.  If I do a follow-up post on something, I try to link the old one and new one to each other.  For example, I wrote about Child's Glacier in 2011, and later that year, a bridge to the glacier was closed for repairs and it won't be rebuilt for at least five years.  Driving to Child's Glacier is out of the question now and it seemed relevant to add that to the original post too.  But sometimes I just have to trust that readers are smart enough to look at the dates of posts, so when someone googles "Seward Highway Closure"  they realize the post they found was written in 2009.
• Labels (also known as tags or categories) - Grrrr.  These are the reference terms bloggers can attach to posts to help search engines find the post and that form a very rough blog index - in the right column at the bottom on my blog.  I'm not sure how much they are still used by search engines - based on tracking people's search terms and what posts google offers them.  My labels list is pretty uneven.  I have some labels with just one post referenced.  There are other names or topics which show up in many posts, but I never made labels for them.  I'm not sure how valuable it is to try to add labels to old posts or get rid of labels that only have one post.  Mel, at Bent Alaska, has suggested this as a reason to move to WordPress, but things aren't broken enough to switch.  
• Blogger Changes - Blogspot regularly offers new ways to do things, new ways to organize the page.  It's well past time I catch up with the latest improvements to see if there are ones that fit my needs.
• Basic Review - It's coming up on six years now.  It's time to update things like my profile. I should probably write a Page (again, this means here those tabs on top) about what I'm trying to do here. Then I could link to pages like this one for those who want to know why I'm doing what I do.

Generally, blogging is fun.  Sometimes though, I need time for a post to germinate, and it has to just sit until I'm ready to tease it out.  Sometimes, blogging is a way to avoid doing things I need to do - like battles in the Clutter Wars, or doing other house maintenance work.

So, recognizing this, I'm thinking about limiting my blog time until I get necessary chores completed.  I may even take a few breaks this summer.   Or maybe I'll find a way to do decent posts that don't take up too much time.  Or highlight some older posts that deserve a second look.  It's still an experiment in what can be done with this medium. 

Potter Marsh

We stopped by Potter Marsh Saturday afternoon.  I've stopped being frustrated with my camera's limited ability to get decent distant shots (ie - most birds) and take it as a challenge to find good photos and ways to push the limits of my camera.

So the purple nailed hand dangling from this truck that pulled in next to us and blocked my view of the water seemed like a natural shot.

And this dead gull floating near the shore.  Not sure what the story was, perhaps it was hit by a vehicle.  It wasn't far from the road.

Last year's dead grasses and reeds are still evident.  While most of Anchorage's trees are fully green now, Potter Marsh still has lots of ungreen.

From the board walk we saw a wide array of birds - most impressive were a sandhill crane that flew a wide arc, a bald eagle that flew out of its nest at the end of the boardwalk, a pair of teal, and the little swallows that were sitting on the railings.  I did figure out how to use the free public telescopes on the viewing platforms as a telephoto lens for my camera.  It's not perfect, but it did yield this picture of a pair of American wigeons.  Then my battery died. 

Drugs Delivered By High Tech Mosquito Bite

From MIT News:

MIT researchers have engineered a device that delivers a tiny, high-pressure jet of medicine through the skin without the use of a hypodermic needle. The device can be programmed to deliver a range of doses to various depths — an improvement over similar jet-injection systems that are now commercially available. 

The researchers say that among other benefits, the technology may help reduce the potential for needle-stick injuries; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that hospital-based health care workers accidentally prick themselves with needles 385,000 times each year. A needleless device may also help improve compliance among patients who might otherwise avoid the discomfort of regularly injecting themselves with drugs such as insulin.

Now the MIT team, led by Ian Hunter, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has engineered a jet-injection system that delivers a range of doses to variable depths in a highly controlled manner. The design is built around a mechanism called a Lorentz-force actuator — a small, powerful magnet surrounded by a coil of wire that’s attached to a piston inside a drug ampoule. When current is applied, it interacts with the magnetic field to produce a force that pushes the piston forward, ejecting the drug at very high pressure and velocity (almost the speed of sound in air) out through the ampoule’s nozzle — an opening as wide as a mosquito’s proboscis.(Emphasis added.)

 In the movie the professor says something like, as we all know, we don't feel it when the mosquito inserts its proboscis into the skin . . . He obviously hasn't experienced Alaskan mosquitoes.

As someone whose body instinctively rejects the idea of needles and getting shots since my first encounter many, many years ago, this sounds like a great alternative.

They don't discuss in the video whether the pressure or magnets can in any way change chemical composition of the drugs which might affect their effectiveness.  Or whether one can feel, if not a needle, the pressure of the drug coming into the body. 

There are always issues when very simple, mechanical devices are replaced with much more complex electronic devices.  The cost of such a device will clearly be much greater than the cost of a plastic hypodermic needle.  But since those needles get tossed after one use, one might expect some environmental benefits.  But how many times can one of these gadgets deliver the meds before it needs repair or maintenance?  In other words, how much does it cost per shot compared to the present?  How is it disposed when it finally dies?

While it sounds like such a device will make self-injection (say for a diabetic) a little simpler, and without having to puncture one's skin, it will also most likely make it a lot more expensive.  And what happens if you drop one of these babies?  Will it have to be repaired or replaced?

A hypodermic needle is pretty basic technology.  How will a nurse know that this new gun isn't delivering a drug at the programmed speed?  I'm sure they have asked all these questions, but the cynic in me is always questioning.  I get, very well, the benefit of injection without a needle prick - though I'm not sure that the 'mosquito proboscis' isn't really a tiny needle - but I don't get the need for all the velocity control.

And presumably, the profits from this device would be shared by the inventors and MIT.