Why Did The Cellist Use Pillows To Hold Up Her Cello?

When I'm Outside, people often ask me, "So, what's there to do in Anchorage?"  Well, here's some of what I've done the last two days.  And because this is Anchorage, I actually know some of these people.  

Friday night we went to an exquisite baroque cello concert.  Tanya Tomkins (you can hear snippets at the link) was accompanied by University of Alaska Anchorage music professor John Lutterman.  The picture was during a pause when they were answering questions from the audience.

Tanya preempted the question about the pillows.  These are baroque cellos so they don't have endpins like modern cellos.  Normally they are held between the legs as John is doing in the picture, but Tanya had a back problem last year and started using the pillows and she likes it.  And I thought the music was sublime.  So did others in the audience including some who actually know something about music. 

John also raised the question of whether his modern copy of a baroque cello might be more authentic than Tanya's 300 year old cello.  After all, he said, they didn't use 300 year old cellos in Bach's day. 

We heard two Bach suites (1 and 2)  for cello, a Vivaldi sonata, a Geminiani sonata, and a canon by Gabrielli.   The music flowed from the stage and caressed my music receptors. 


Saturday morning I went to a Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) meeting.  This group is so incredibly well organized and informed.  We meet monthly and teleconference into an international (includes Canada) phone call and each month there are more chapters (92 Saturday.)  The mission is minimize the damage caused the planet by carbon based fuels.  The specific focus now is to get a carbon tax passed.  Local chapters all over the country educate their Congress members and Senators on how a carbon tax uses market principles to correct a market failure - the negative externalities caused by oil and gas.

Anchorage Climate Change Chapter Participating In National Teleconference

The speaker was Sam Daley-Harris on his updated book Reclaiming Our Democracy which will come out this summer.  He's added a chapter about CCL.  In addition to helping members get expertise on the various climate change issues, the group also talks about political strategy, and personal issues like how to get outside one's comfort zone to do what needs to be done.  For those who feel there's nothing they can do to overcome the numerous problems facing humans today, I'd strongly recommend listening to the audio of Saturday's conference call  which you can hear here.  (I couldn't get it using Firefox but I could in Safari.)  The intro to Sam starts about 8 minutes in. 


And Saturday night we walked through the new snow to the UAA concert featuring Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Dan Bern, and Alaskan musician, Doug Geeting.  Here are all three together on stage at the end of the concert.  I've been listening a lot to Dan's 2 Foot Tall album, but he didn't play anything from that.  This was a Woody Guthrie tribute concert. 

Geeting (l), Elliot (c), Bern (r)

It was good to have Dan back in Anchorage again after last October's songwriters' workshop.  

There was an opera and two different small venue plays that we had to skip cause you just can't do everything.  I did manage to bake a couple of loaves of bread. 

What You Should Know Before Voting A Questioned Ballot

In some cases you don't have a choice - there is something wrong and you have to vote a questioned ballot.  But most of the people who voted questioned ballots at the polling place I worked at on Tuesday did so  because it was "near work."  But if you vote out of your precinct you may not be able to vote in all the races in your district. 

 These are the questioned ballots sitting in City Hall on Friday afternoon.  They were divided by precincts where the person voted.  Yesterday, and today, and perhaps tomorrow, the election commission is going through the ballots to verify the person is qualified to vote.  (City employees I talked to said they were volunteering Saturday.)  So they take a precinct, if I got this right, and review each questioned ballot voter.

Click to Enlarge

The ballot is sealed inside the yellow envelope and they are reviewing the information the voter filled out on the outside of the envelope. 


If the voter is found to be an eligible voter, they then put the ballot envelope into the voter's actual precinct.  (I'm not sure if they put the rejected ones there too.  And I'm not sure how they separate them from the ones already there that they haven't checked yet.)

Then,  people whose ballots have been rejected will be notified and have a chance to appeal.  I heard someone say they'll get a letter AND a phone call.  Then, when this whole process is done, they'll start counting the ballots.

The video has deputy election clerk Amanda Moser explaining this briefly and showing you the set up at City Hall better.  



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Why Vote Questioned Ballot?

The Muni Election Manual lists ten reasons:

1. Voter's name is not in the Precinct Register
   This could be because there is a mistake, the voter isn't actually registered, or the voter is in the wrong precinct. 
2. Voter is voting out of precinct
   This one the voter has the most control over, though sometimes voters aren't sure where their polling place is.  Most of the 10 people at our polling place who voted questioned ballots did so because they worked downtown and it was more convenient. 
3. Voter does not have identification and is not personally known to an election worker
4. Voter's name has changed
5. Voter has a felony conviction
   I'm not sure how the poll worker would know this (or 6 or 18 or 10) if the voter didn't volunteer the information.  The other way would be 7 - the voter is challenged by a poll watcher.
6. Voter is not a US citizen
7. Voter is challenged by the Poll Watcher
   The candidates or (in partisan elections) political parties can send poll watchers to make sure that voters are on the lists and that the process is run properly.  If they think a voter is not registered or not qualified, they can challenge the voter who would then have to vote questioned ballot.  We didn't have any poll watchers at our precinct Tuesday. 
8. A red line is drawn through the voter's name indicating the voter has received an absentee ballot
9. Voter is not 18 years of age
10. Voter has moved

Why you might not want to vote questioned ballot

Click to Enlarge

Sometimes you don't have a choice.  But most of the people who voted questioned ballot at the poll I worked at did so for convenience - they worked downtown and voting in their home precinct would have been out of the way.

If you do have a choice, there are some things to consider:

1. There are a number of different ballots - which reflect different candidates in different districts and for some districts, different local bond issues.  If you vote in a precinct outside your home district, you will get a different ballot.
2. If you live in a different election district you might not be able to vote for all the candidates and issues up for a decision in your district.
   At my precinct, there was no Assembly race.  People from districts that had an Assembly race couldn't vote on that race. 
3. If there are races on the ballot that you aren't eligible to vote on (because you live in a different district) if you fill in that part of the ballot, it won't count. 
4. You have to fill out more information and your vote won't be counted until the end.
5. It costs all taxpayers extra to process all the questioned voters.  

What Options Do You Have?

1. Vote in your own precinct.
   The polls are open from 7am to 8pm.  Just go by your own precinct if you can. 
2. Vote in a precinct in your same election district.
   This way you'll get the same ballot that you would get in your own precinct.  Each of the different ballots has a number on the bottom "Card X."  The election binder in each polling place has a list of all street addresses and where they vote.  We also found online a list of all the polling places and the card number of the ballot in that polling place.  So, we could tell people whether their home precinct used the same ballot we had or not.  But I don't think that was available at every polling place.
3. Vote early.
   There are three locations in Anchorage where you can vote the week before the election: 
   
   • City Hall;
   • Loussac Library; and the
   • Chugiak Senior Center. 
   On election day you can vote any ballot at the
   
   • Airport;
   • UAA; and
   • Loussac Library. 
   These locations have ballots for all the different districts so you can get the right ballot.  It seemed to me that the people who voted out of precinct at our polling place on Tuesday because "it was near work" could have voted at City Hall during the previous week.  Though for some of them, they got the same ballot they would have gotten in their own precinct.
4. Vote absentee.
   You can sign up to have your ballot sent to your house and you can mail it in. 

OK, I realize this doesn't dig too deeply into how they figure out whose vote will count and the info about whether to vote absentee should have been up before the election.  But I didn't know it then.  Maybe I'll post something on that next year before the election.  It really makes more sense to vote early or in your own precinct or one that has the same ballot. 


[UPDATE March 12, 2014:  Viddler video replaced with YouTube]

Brief Detour On Way To Summer

The Pros(e) and Cons of Computers Grading Essays

There was lots of coverage today about a new computer program for grading essays.  As a retired college professor who graded thousands of student papers, I have a few thoughts on this.

1.  Humans have abilities that computers still don't have.

For an easy example, let's start with CAPTCHA which is based on the premise that human brains can make simple distinctions that computers can't make:

"CAPTCHA: Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can't:
The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University."

Computers do a great job of spell-checking and some grammar checking.   But when it comes to evaluating the development of an argument, supporting the argument, the flow from beginning to end, and any number of other more subtle aspects of language usage, skilled humans are still significantly better.  If you need a human to read a captcha, you need a human to read a poem or an essay. 

I took the second (italicized) sentence from the paragraph above and asked Bing's translation page to turn it into Turkish and then back into English.  Here's the resulting English sentence:

"But when it comes to evaluating the development of this argument, the argument, in the end, and many other, more subtle aspects of language use startup current supporting people still significantly better."

How is a computer that can write that sentence in English going to evaluate a student's writing?  

That doesn't mean that in ten years computers won't be much better.  And I'm not saying there aren't uses for such a program.  It would be great for students to run their own essays through such a program, just as many of them use a spell-check and grammar-check.  But ultimately they need a skilled and dedicated reader to give them really good feedback. 

Would a program like this be better than a teacher who does nothing more than put a grade at the bottom of the paper?  The question then becomes about bad teachers and mediocre machines.  Again, I'd say it should be used by the student, like spell-check, not as a substitute for the teacher.  And I suspect if it's available, students will use it.  Will teachers forbid such use as cheating?  I hope not.  There will still be issues for the teacher to address. 

2.  Computers are likely to penalize non-standard and creative approaches

Computers can evaluate essays by absorbing a lot of rules on grammar, spelling, style, and perhaps even logical arguments against which they can measure the essay.  But the rules aren't enough.  In some cases there are conflicting rules or disagreements about the rules.  And the malleability of language means the rules are constantly evolving.

But even the best writers don't necessarily follow the rules, and often it's in breaking the rule that they do their best writing.   Strunk and White wrote the basic English writing style rule book, The Elements of Style.  In the introduction they write:

"It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. "

But will the computer see the compensating merit or just the violation?   I'm afraid that the necessarily limited boundaries of the computer program would lead student writing to get more and more homogenous. 



3.  Grading essays is feedback for teachers about what the students are learning

Perhaps my biggest objection is in response to this statement in the NY Times article:

"The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks."

Other tasks, like what?  Going to departmental meetings?  I found in my teaching experience that reading student papers gave me invaluable feedback on how my students were doing which reflected directly on how well I was teaching.  Reading the papers told me most of what I needed to know to improve my teaching.   Machine grading dilutes this feedback source significantly.  The job of the teacher, as I see it,  is to know each student and find ways to get the student from where he is to where he ought to be in terms of basic skills and understanding of concepts.

The argument that faculty have too many students to be able to grade the essays says a lot about how colleges have moved away from being educational institutions  to being degree factories. 

The answer isn't more machines.   I have no problem with students using such programs the way they now use spell-check. Ultimately, though,  the teachers should still grade them in the end. 

 

Permanent Fund's Future Looking Dim - "It's Our Oil" Rally: The Movie

From a PR standpoint, probably the most effective signs at yesterday's rally to prevent Republicans from transferring billions of Alaska's oil revenues to oil companies, are the ones that predicted the demise of the Permanent Fund.  That's a cause all Alaskans will fight.   But it only makes sense - if our oil revenues plummet, so will the Permanent Fund*.  


If a journalist is watching a mugging, should she just take notes or try to intervene?  When does once humanity take precedence over one's profession?  I've heard photojournalists argue that they've been in terrible situations where intervening might not have helped, but their photos calling attention to atrocities can help in the long run.   In this post I can't quite help myself.  I don't see two valid sides to this story.  I'd like to think I'm being both a human being and a reasonable journalist here.  But I'm sure others will disagree.

Despite what Republicans may have talked themselves into believing, all their rationales are just cover for transferring billions of dollars from the State of Alaska to the oil companies.  These 'incentives' by the state are matched by absolutely no commitments on the part of the oil companies.  Remember this is brought to us by the party that includes not a few members who think global climate change is a hoax, that the world is only 6000 years old, and who take their marching orders on gay rights from Deuteronomy.   There is a reason Republicans want to gut the public schools - education hurts their election chances. 


Right now, the State of Alaska is being fleeced by Republican legislators lowering the taxes on oil companies in the vague hope that this will stimulate production.  Our Governor was a lobbyist for Conoco-Phillips before becoming Sarah Palin's Lt. Governor and then, when she quit, Governor.  Two of the Senators who voted for Senate Bill 21are currently employees of oil companies when they aren't on leave to be in the legislature.  Without those two votes, the bill would not have passed.  The Senate majority voted they didn't have a conflict of interest.  If they had been members of the Sierra Club and their votes would have stopped the bill, do you think they would have been allowed to vote?  I don't think so.

So, the legislature is emptying the Bank of Alaska and taking the loot to the getaway cars driven by the  big three oil companies.  We are like a third world nation, except that this seems to have become standard operating procedure in the US now as well.  (I don't understand how Alaskan Tea Party folks who fume over the bank bailouts aren't equally upset about their legislators actions on oil (yeah the most conservative supporters of this were elected by Tea Party supporters).

The sequester will strongly weaken government's ability to not only maintain vital infrastructure - transportation, health and safety, education, crime prevention, etc. - but also makes it much harder for the government to regulate industry.  Exactly what the Koch brothers, who have funded much of this, want.  I do have to admire their ability to get ardent support from some of the people who will be hurt most.

Facts and reason have had little effect at all against the power of the oil companies.  Six years after the FBI video taped VECO executives bribing Republican legislators over oil taxes in the Baranof Hotel's Suite 602, and with most if not all of those convicted back on the streets, they've returned to business as usual. 

In any case, here's a video that shows those who mustered 9 votes to the Republicans' 11 votes in the Senate,  on 4th Avenue yesterday in front of the Legislative Information Office.

[Update April 7, 2013: Whoops, the video wasn't there. It should be now.]

The speakers include a number of former legislators, Wally Hickel's long time aide and biographer Malcolm Roberts, two people - Katie Hurley and Vic Fischer - who were participants in the Alaska Constitutional Convention, and Anchorage Assembly write-in  candidate, Nick Moe, who's challenge to Assembly Chair Ernie Hall is still too close to call. 


*We have in recent years, gotten more income from investments than oil revenue, which is how things were originally projected when people thought the oil would be almost depleted by now.  However, it appears that last year's oil revenue was greater than our investment revenue.  The Annual Report (p. 6) shows that investment gains were less than the drop in the overall portfolio value, meaning the real gain was from oil revenue.  Oil revenue last year was $915 million, about what the Governor's bill proposes to cut each year.

Drastically reducing our oil revenue like this will keep the Permanent Fund from growing as it should.  Our $45 billion Permanent Fund is dwarfed by Norway's $700 billion oil fund which started much later and is supported by smaller oil reserves.

Political Graffiti

We walked past this sign Wednesday night.  It seems someone felt Clary's connection to the Anchorage Baptist Temple deserved some recognition on his signs.

And when I checked the spelling of 'graffiti' I found this do-it-yourself graffiti creator site.  This just popped out of my finger tips.  It just seemed right to play with their "Kodiak' style.  [UPDATE March 8, 2014:  I went back to the diy site today and I can't find the page where I created the image below.  Now it looks like you have to buy it all.  Graffiti artists need to make a living too.  But you can go to fontmeme where you can generate your own graffiti in different fonts and colors.]

From the Muni Election page:

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 4 -SEAT F Total Number of Precincts 25 Precincts Reporting 23 92.0% Times Counted 6178/35860 17.2% Total Votes 6055 CLARY, Andy 2506 41.39% TRAINI, Dick 3497 57.75% Write-in Votes 52 0.86%

"It's Our Oil" Rally Against Giving Billions To Oil Companies

Backbone formed back in the 1999 to stop the state from signing itself over to BP.  It's come back to life recently as the Corrupt Bastards Club reappeared in Juneau and started the process to drastically lower taxes on oil companies over again,.  Ex(?) Conoco-Phillips lobbyist Governor Sean Parnell says SB 21 is needed to get the oil companies to produce more oil.  But there is nothing in the legislation that requires anything from the oil companies.  It's just a straight transfer from the State treasury to the oil companies.  (OK, not exactly.  It's money we now get through our tax system which we won't get if this passes.)  Is this a whole new Republican philosophy?  Hmmm, maybe we should pay drunks on the hope that they become sober and crooks on the hopes it will cause them to be honest.  (Sorry, do you think I have an opinion here?  Some issues are just so black and white that pretending there are two equally valid sides is the deceptive way to report it.)

So, here are some pictures from the noon rally in downtown Anchorage at the Legislative Information Office on a sunny, but definitely wind-chilled day.  Here are some photos of the demonstration.  I'll try to get some video up later.

Poll Worker Notes

Tuesday was Municipal Elections in Anchorage  By the time elections ended at 8pm, we'd already started closing down the polling place.  Some of the Vote Here signs were brought in.  We started counting the people on the register who'd voted.  Putting furniture back the way it had been. (We took pictures the day before. :) ) There were three people who'd been working since 6:15 am and two others who came about 1pm.  We did a lot of stuff reasonably well, but there were some problems too. 





I was counting the people in the register who'd voted.  They'd been marked with a

Roster smudged to hide identifiers

highlighter so it was fairly easy to count and a subtotal on each page.  But my total was one more than the votes counted on the voting machine and 9 less than the number of ballots we'd given out.  There had been 10 questioned ballots so the voting machine and the ballot stub numbers matched, but I was one off.  That got resolved when the chair remembered that a worker had marked the wrong name in the morning and then had marked the right name.  So there was one extra bright yellow highlighted name and that had been marked.  It took us a couple more runs to find where that was marked.  So that was ok.

But then they were missing something they called the memory card envelope that was supposed to hold the computer printout tapes we'd all signed..  We tore everything open and then closed everything back up looking for it.  The chair swore it had been right there.  Someone found a clear plastic envelope/bag and proposed putting the computer tapes in there instead.  We didn't know where the bag had come from and whether it belonged to the church that was hosting the polling place or what.  But we couldn't find the one we needed so it was stuck in this new clear plastic bag with green on it.

One of the workers who was still there is older and has had back and neck surgery and was clearly tired.  (Actually, most of us were older.)  But she knew what she was doing and was acting as the co-chair.  We carried stuff to the chair's car while the chair was calculating the time sheet for all the workers.  (Yes, I had a paying job!)  There was a drop from the church floor out to the parking lot that wasn't marked and J stumbled and fell to the ground and had to rest a few minutes before she had the strength to get up with my help.  She and the chair had all the stuff in the car and drove off to City Hall to drop it off.  We were only two block from City Hall and I debated if I should walk or drive.  I drove but it turned out the parking lot was jammed and so I went back and parked near the church and walked back.

You can see a video of this in yesterday's post

The Chair and J were finally near the door and unloading everything at the end of the line of people and I helped at that point.  The Chair left to park her car and I stayed with J.  It was clear to me she was really tired and I suggested I drive her back to her car and send her home and I'd stay with the Chair.  But when the Chair got back before I could say anything, she asked if I could stay and help.  I said yes, because that's what I intended to do, but then the Chair said she had a 7am flight and would leave me and J to finish up.  J agreed over my protest and the Chair said good bye and left.

Someone brought us a cart to put the boxes and bags on and we waited in line in the chilly, but not too cold night.  Soon they were ushering the line inside the building and at least had the line where it was warmer.  They also passed out water and candy and later vegies - and assured us this was not from taxpayer dollars. 


Eventually we got to two folks who took our stuff.  They had a checklist they were working through.  The voting machine, the sealed memory card in the machine, the ballots, the questioned ballots, etc.  J was concerned about the envelope that held the printed out tapes from the voting machine.  But it turned out the plastic bag/envelope we found to put them in was actually what they were supposed to be in.  Our red bag - with the questioned ballots (we didn't have any special needs) - didn't have a zip tie, but they put one on.   I know that no one tampered with them, but still . . .  it should have been sealed. 

J and I had been there since 6:15am and it was pushing 10:30pm.  We had some questions about the time sheets for the poll workers.  Our chair had put 8 hours down as the total for everyone as ST (Straight Time, I think) and all the rest was OT (overtime.)  But that didn't make sense to me.  I thought there shouldn't be overtime unless you worked 8 hours in one day.  They told me my way of calculating was correct. 

We were finally done.  I got my car and came back to pick up J and drive her to her car.  I thought about going to election central across the street at the Dena'ina Center, but I was just too tired and went home. 

Ah. . . Breakup

That time of year when sun and snow conspire to put Anchorage underwater. 

Wild End To Generally Quiet Day At The Polling Place

I'll write tomorrow after I get a good night's sleep, but the end of the day proved a lot more hectic than I expected with a huge mob of election workers jammed up at City Hall trying to turn in the ballots, voting machines, and other odds and ends.

But here's a glimpse of the election workers waiting to get their materials checked in.  This was about 9:30pm.  Polls closed at 8.  We finally got out about 10:45pm.






I watched this function last November as a poll watcher at the State and Federal election.  They had a lot more space and had runners going out to the cars as they pulled up who carried the equipment into the room.  I also know that new Municipal Clerk Barbara Jones has worked hard to make sure this election didn't suffer the problems that happened last year.  And people were out offering help - someone gave us a cart to put everything on - and someone else was offering candy and another had bottles of water.  Given the long line, in the end we got through in about an hour and were handled very efficiently and courteously by the people inside.  And as we were leaving someone was offering vegies on a tray. 

 Doing this as a poll worker gave me a whole different look at what goes on.  After getting the ballot materials turned in, I was just too tired to go over to election central and I have no idea what the results of the election were.  I'll read the paper when i get up tomorrow.