Another Anchorage-Seattle Flight

We flew to Seattle Monday.  Wednesday my baby gets married.  It's a very small family event.  But I'm supposed to keep family matters to a minimum here, so let's leave it at that.  There was rare thunder Sunday night and the big clouds were still hanging around when we left, but it was sunny and warm (pushing 70˚F). 

 There was a recent issue in Anchorage about the airport wanting to swap part of the coastal trail for some other land.  But from up here across the inlet, you can see how much land the airport already takes.  It's that gray blob in the center right.  It would be interesting to figure out how many times downtown or the university are would fit inside the airport land. 

For a few minutes clouds blocked the Chugach, then it was just snowy peaks and puffy clouds.  That's Turnagain Arm in the upper left.

The non-snowy land is Girdwood valley, again with Turnagain Arm in the background.

This is the east end of Prince William Sound, Whittier is at the end of the lower arm, if I had my bearings right.   And soon enough it was mostly cloudy and read and snoozed.

There were breaks in the clouds and here we're crossing back into the US from Canada. 

Seattle was covered in thick clouds.

William Cruz Wants You To Vote

William Cruz, in the video below, says he set a goal to register 100 new voters.  Since we did the video last Friday, he says he's gotten six so far.

This is a democracy, and William and I agree on the point that voting is important.  If you don't vote, you've given up.  Many argue that there are no good choices.  I would argue that when we are down to two candidates, there's generally a better and worse candidate.  But I'll acknowledge that the current system sets up all candidates to be in debt to the people who fund their campaigns.   And so they are required to be polite and responsive to those who pay.  And to spend an obscene amount of time raising money instead of legislating or governing.  The Citizens United case is making money even more important.

But the fact of the matter is that a democracy doesn't work if people aren't involved.  Our last Municipal election, 65% of eligible voters didn't vote.

Say there's a storm coming and your house might get flooded.  You can get things out or move them upstairs.  You can put up sandbags.  It won't be easy. You can work your tail off attempting to save your house or you can just give it up and say it's impossible.

Giving up on democracy is a pretty radical concession. But we are facing a flood.  The current Supreme Court has made some critical decisions, starting with Bush v. Gore and including Citizens United. If the next Supreme Court justice is of the same ideology as the Citizens United majority, our chances at saving Democracy get even slimmer.*  If we keep electing enough people who vote to protect the 1%, life in the US is going to get grittier and grittier for the other 99%.

If the candidates aren't any good, then it behooves people to make sure good candidates run.  Voting is important, but we also have to get good candidates on the ballot and help make sure they get elected.  We simply have no choice but to be involved unless we just give over our governments (the various local, state, and the federal governments) to those with deep, deep pockets.   Our job is a lot easier than it was for individuals to fight the Nazis or to help slaves escape from the South or to demand change in Egypt*.  It involves investing time and money in good candidates.

We aren't risking our lives. Or even giving up much of what we have. At least not yet. OK, that's my soapbox for today.  Here's William's story.  The last minute or two is in Spanish.




 I should disclose that William took two classes from me a six or seven years ago and that he did invite me to do this video. We did a couple of questions more than once and I picked what I thought would best tell his story.

*OK, I know that these statements sound fairly absolute but I recognize that the scourge of many right wing politicians - the ACLU - was on the winning side of Citizens United, so it's more complicated.  The idea of corporate personhood is not something the court created.  The change in Egypt is not necessarily going to be for the better.  So, I'm letting you know that I know down here.

How Do You Know?

I've been reading Jeffrey L. Buller's The Essential College Professor, as I'm thinking about this mentoring program for new faculty.  I thought I'd pass on some ideas from the chapter on Assessing Student Learning. This is probably the hardest and most time consuming (if done well) activity of teaching.  While for some this is well known, I'm sure there are those for whom this is new or needs refreshing.

Buller points out that you have to know what your learning goals are for the students before you can assess them.  And as part of this discussion he identifies different ways people have described 'knowing.'

Column 1Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning and Knowing Processes (1956) Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis Evaluation

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences (1983) Musical Bodily-Kinesthetic Logical-mathematical intelligence Linguistic intelligence Spatial intelligence Interpersonal intelligence Intrapersonal intelligence PLUS (2003) Naturalist intelligence Spiritual intelligence

Anderson and Krathwohl’s Respose to Bloom (2001) 6 Cognitive processes Remembering:  Recognizing, recalling, and retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory Understanding Applying Analyzing Evaluating Creating 4 Kinds of knowledge Factual knowledge Conceptual Procedural Metacognitive The links will give you more information on each model.

Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning Foundational Knowledge.  Understanding and remembering: information ideas Application.  Utilizing skills thinking  - critical, creative, practical managing projects Integration.  Connecting: ideas people realms of life Human dimension.  Learning about: oneself others Caring.  Developing new: feelings Interests values Learning how to learn by: becoming a better student inquiring about a subject improving as a self-directed learner

HTML Tables

It's useful to recognize that there are different ways of 'knowing' and different kinds of intelligence. Mostly college grades focus on logical-mathematical intelligence, but as Gardner points out, there are other kinds of intelligence that are important.

The chapter doesn't really tell us how to apply these models to construct class goals and to assess student work except in the most general way.  It does highlight an important thought on teaching:

Truly effective instruction is not measured by how much college professors teach, but by how much college students learn.

That ought to be posted above every college professor's desk. 

Blooming in the Yard

Don't be fooled. Our yard looks much nicer here. where I can focus where you look, than it does in real life

Iris

Himalayan Blue Poppy

Chocolate Lilies

 

This one is new this year and I can't find the tag that tells me what it is, but I like it.

Lamium

 I tried to find where I posted this once before and a reader identified it.  But I couldn't.  Anyone know?

Flax

The flax are about dime sized and they come up each year on delicate stems that sway in the gentlest breeze and make it hard to capture in the camera.

Daisy and friend

Phlox (not to be confused with the flax above)

I also filtered some of last year's compost to get rid of the bigger twigs and roots and added this to the top soil I put into the side of the garage where I added that insulation last fall.

Citizen Group on Election Meeting Now with Assembly Attorney

I'm at the City Hall listening in a a meeting between the Citizens Group that ponied up the $1500 to pay for the recount of 15 precincts from the April Municipal election.

This post is being written on the fly.  So bear with they typos.  Plus I got to this meeting late because I had a previous meeting so I might have missed something that happened before I go here.  The meeting is still going on. 

People here include  most of the Citizens Group folks,  the Assembly attorney Julia Tucker, the Municipal Clerk-to-be Barb Jones, and two other employees of the clerk’s office who have worked on elections, and two Assembly members - Harriet Drummond and Dick Traini - and a representative of the ACLU.  








The citizens group presented a 110 page report of concerns and recommendations to make future municipal elections more secure.

It will be interesting to compare this report created by volunteers who paid, as a group, $1500 to have the election recounted, to the official report the Muni is paying up to $30,000 for.  I understand the two reports aren't reviewing exactly the same thing.  

There were six different topics identified in newsprint on the wall:

1.  Accuvote issues


2.  Protocols for
    a.  recount
    b.  ballot accountability
    c.  Precinct stamp to track ballots and questioned ballots by precinct
    d.  determining # of ballots by precinct
    e.  Training
    f.   procedure for hand count






3.  Title 28
    a.  ballot accountability report
    b.   determining # of ballots by precinct
    c.   Election worker/trouble shooter training
    d.   28.50.090  suspect qualifications
    e.   % of precincts that should be counted by hand
    f.    Recount - absentee and Questioned ballots 
          28.90.040C  needs to conform and make sense with the code
                 clarify “separate precinct” when they are pooled
4.  Questioned Ballots
    a.  to be counted by precinct or race
    b.  if precinct, then machine count or hand count?
    c.  what is NOT a questioned ballot?
    d.  numbering questioned ballots envelops
    e.  if by precinct, then
        1.  where voted
        2.  where actually reside

5.  Value Issues
    a.  Security, space, organization
    b.  Ballot bag review
    c.  Public observers/Tech for machine programming
    d.  Ballots should be numbered/ not stub only

I must say that the tone in this room is very open and people are listening to each other and asking serious questions about the problems being raised and how to resolve them in the future.   I've got some video which is not comprehensive, but which does give a sense of the tone of the meeting.

How Creatively Do You Lose Things? Disappearing In Plain Sight

I think I should get a prize for how well I lost this punch card to the Spenard Jazz Festival.  We came home from the poetry night.  I knew I'd put the card in my shirt pocket.  But the next day I couldn't find it.  I called the Organic Oasis to see if anyone had found the card.  No.  It wasn't in the car.  Not on my desk.  Not in the cubby hole I put things from my pockets. I couldn't find it anywhere in the house.  We at least got two punches used up of the five.   When I finally find things, I usually try to note where they were, so that I have a list of places where to look for, say, the keys, or other items that I can't find.  So, this is a note for all of you.  A place where a small card can disappear in plain sight. 

Yesterday I was sitting on the bottom stair putting on shoes.  Now look at this picture and see if you can find the punch card. 

You can see (above) why I couldn't find the card.  But let's look a little closer - which I was able to do when I was putting on my shoes.

All I can imagine is that I pulled the various pieces of paper out of my shirt pocket at the stairs and the card somehow flew out and, against the odds,  got caught in the molding.  There are a lot of things that I misplace, and fret that I should have been paying better attention.  I feel no guilt over this one.  It was just a freak event.  Now, if the card had slipped in there facing the other way around, I would have found it easily as you can see in the next picture.

I'll just have to chalk this up as a donation to a non-profit that does a lot with very little.

[UPDATE 10:00am:  In the comments, Barbara says she's reminded of Beethoven's Rage Over a Lost Penny, Vented in a Caprice.  So, here, via Fledermaus1990's Youtube you can vent over whatever you've lost today.





In an untitled piece in Notes (June 1950) retrieved through JSTOR, Jacob Avshalomoff writes that Rage over the Lost Penny, Vented in a Caprice is 

“a title made up by the first publisher, Diabelli, when he issued the work posthumously in 1828 from the same manuscript used by Dr. Hertzmann.”  

He goes on to say that Dr. Hertzmann’s edition after the manuscript resurfaced in 1945 is far superior to the Diabelli edition.  He also tells us more about the piece itself:

Dr. Hertzmann demonstrates quite convincingly that the piece was not a late work, but was probably sketched by Beethoven between 1795 and 1798.  He thinks that Beethoven did this as some preparatory “homework” for his frequent public demonstrations of ‘improvisation,” and that this is why the composer did not finish up the piece and have it published.”

Thanks Barbara for the tip here.

What New Faculty Need . . .

First, each new faculty member is unique, so each will have different needs, but I think they all need a support system of other good local faculty across disciplines and they all need ways to make the best use of the time they have.   They'll need some straight talk on how the tenure and promotion system works and how they can best prepare.  And an introduction to this campus and to Anchorage and Alaska.  Beyond that, some will want help with teaching issues and others with research issues. 

I met with some folks at UAA yesterday to talk about setting up an informal group of new faculty for the fall semester.  As someone who has taught for many years here, it seemed like something I could do.  I used to go to the new faculty reception and look for the most interesting new scholars and get a small group together at lunch.  It gave them a chance to meet people in other fields and me a chance to connect with interesting new scholars.   I went to the library after the meeting and pulled out some books just to see what others are saying on this topic.

The black book on the bottom was a nasty piece of work.  Anonymous - he said he had to be anonymous so he wouldn't lose his job - trashes everything about universities.  The faculty don't do any work, the students don't either, and the administrators are former faculty who couldn't teach or do research.  If it really was a faculty member, he would have been the kind he was complaining about.  But if it really was a faculty member, then the reason he had to be anonymous was because the book was so bad, no documentation, and totally unbalanced.  The tone starts off with a dedication to Hubert Humphrey:

"who, AFTER LOSING IN 1968, BECAME A PROFESSOR - AND THEREBY PROVED THE CORRECTNESS OF MY VOTE FOR RICHARD NIXON"

That's probably the most objective part of the book.   It was published in 1972.  The publisher, according to Wikipedia, 

Arlington House, Inc., (dba as Arlington House Publishers), now-defunct, was an American book publisher of jazz discographies, as well as conservative and anti-communist titles.

This book seems to be part of the early anti-public university movement.

I could tell you lots of things wrong with universities - but for the most part, faculty work incredibly hard.  Yes there are those who abuse the system, but the others more than make up for them.  So, I've got to write up a little more on this project.  If we can make it work, maybe next year we can bring in some other retired faculty to work with more faculty.  The other books have more useful content. 

When I first came here, all the faculty were pretty much in one building and people in different disciplines had offices near by and we all went to the faculty senate meetings.  But nowadays, it's harder for new faculty to find the people they ought to know in other fields.

Trouble Sleeping? Try These Dreams

I'm not sure how I got to this website.  I heard wind blowing and started looking through my tabs until I found it.  It wanted me to turn on my webcam.  I'm glad I did.  This is another amazing website that demonstrates yet another way a great imagination can play with this medium.  I don't want to say too much, but you do play a role in all this.  And when you think things are getting carried away, remember you are part of it all.

I checked.  You don't have to have the cam on, but it's cleverer if you do.  Click on the image to get to the website or here.  (The screen shot definitely does not do it justice.)

Summer (?) in Anchorage - Lots of Airport Runs

Technically, it's summer.  But except for the sun and relative warmth of half of April, it's been more like the summers of the late 70s and early 80s.  Cool, clouds, rain.  But it is summer - because summer is when you drop off and pick up friends at the airport a lot. 





Tuesday night I had two trips.  Here I am waiting at Arrivals while J goes inside to find our friends.

And still there waiting. . .








We got them home and then I went out again to drop another friend at the airport.





By now - on the way home again - it's almost 11pm, but it's summer and still light, even though it's been cloudy and raining all day.  Turning left at Lake Otis and Tudor.  Despite the strip malls and signage, I can still see the Chugach and all is well.

Packaging - Good, Bad, Ugly (Tofu, Bagels, Raisins, Dates)

There is a wide variety of terrible packaging - the worst offender being all the unnecessary plastic garbage that's so difficult to open and mostly just gets thrown away.  I've only picked four items for this post, I'm sure you can pick hundreds more.

We'll start with The Ugly.

Tofu containers.  Terrible!

These are so, so bad.  They're packed with water, which tofu needs.  But they're sealed with the water bulging over the top of the tofu.  So full that once you open them, the tofu is so high in the container, that you can't keep it under water without spilling it - to, from, or in the refrigerator.  If they made the container just a little higher than the tofu, it would make more sense.  There's a better a better way to package tofu waiting to be discovered. 

Costco bagels.  Do the people that designed this ever open Costco bagels?  Do the people at Costco who make these decisions ever open them?

The bagels are in a plastic bag which is sealed with a piece of scotch tape like stuff.  When the sealing machine works right, it says to tear the two ends apart and it opens.  But usually, like in this one (which is already opened) the tape isn't on right and there is only one way to open it - tear the bag open.  And even when the seal is on right, the tape isn't good for resealing.  Even though this picture is focused on the tape, you can't even see it.


The Bad

These raisins used to be in zip lock bags.  That was pretty good.  But they dropped that and added a piece of red tape to reseal the bags.

In theory this could work, but after resealing once or twice, the adhesive gets lazy.  And since there are two pounds of raisins in the bag, you're going to have to reseal it a lot more than once or twice.



The Good

This is an old tray that was used originally to pack California dates.  A cellophane like material covered the dates.  We have two of these trays.  They have to be at least 50 years old - they were in my father's things.

This is great packaging that gets reused over and over again.  I thought about doing this post this morning when I was preparing breakfast for my wife who was slow getting up today.

I'm sure these are from the 1960s or 1950s.  When I looked to see if there was anything on California Date Palm packaging, I found someone offering a tray like this one (well, the etching looked less worn) for $14.99!

What packaging do we see today that will be used so well for 50 years and then be for sale for more than the cost of the product itself?

[I don't know how long Ebay pages are available, but I linked the picture to Ebay if someone wants to buy one.]

And while I was looking up the trays, I found this information about dates from J&J Distributors:

The date is one of the oldest tree crops - records go back over 5,000 years.

Nomads and people of the desert from the Middle East and North Africa consumed dates for survival, and royalty for many generations (dates were considered a delicacy) served this terrific fruit. Spanish missionaries introduced dates to the West in the 18th and 19th centuries, and some of the original palms can still be found in Southern California and Mexico.

The Medjool variety is considered the gourmet of the date family - originating in Morocco, it arrived in the US in 1927. Eleven immature palms were given to the US by the Chariff of Morocco - this was an attempt to save the Medjools that were threatened by disease there. The eleven palms were quarantined for seven years in Nevada, and the nine that survived were relocated to Southern California. Note: the Medjool date is the only date that is harvested fresh and eaten fresh, and is the most labor intensive date to grow and harvest.

Dates provide energy in the form of natural invert sugars - important for those who cannot tolerate sucrose - Medjools have an above average invert sugar content. Date palms flourish in dry heat and minimal rain, and do very well in the Bard Valley of California where the Colorado and Gila rivers allow abundant irrigation for their root structure - 70% of the Medjool dates in the US are produced in the Bard Valley.

The date palm (Phoenix Dactylifera) is known as the tree of life, and there are approximately 22 million palms in Iraq today where approximately 600,000 tons of dates are produced annually.