"We believe this childish mantra . . . which says that we can have anything we want, that reality is not an impediment to what we desire."

[This is one of my meandering posts as one thing leads to another.  It started with the video, but as I tried to get more on the speaker, I found something more profound from the most insightful thinker I've encountered lately - Chris Hedges.  Which, probably not coincidentally, led right back to yesterday's cryptoquote which I left unfinished and I'm guessing most of you didn't take the time to complete.]


So, here's where this all began:  Bill McKibben gives a great overview of the condition of the earth and the battle over climate change at New York's Riverside Church.  [Something I found out about, for the record, because I'm now on Twitter, though I can't reconstruct how.]






His website bio begins:

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him 'the planet's best green journalist' and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was 'probably the country's most important environmentalist.'

Most of the criticism I found on him tended to be friendly fire - disagreements on details or approach by other environmentalists who claimed they basically were on the same side.

I also found a Mount Royal University interview with Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen that includes a critique of an earlier McKibben work on the grounds that he didn't address the underlying issue - the corporate totalitarianism that has taken over the world.

I've had my eye on Chris Hedges for about a year now.  There's an unfinished blog post that I've felt wasn't good enough post yet.  Everything I've heard from Hedges, to me,  is a spot on critique of what's wrong with society today.  He has a great macro understanding plus his years as a top tier foreign correspondent give him knowledge of the details to back up his narrative. 

Here's Truthdig's description of the audio:

What is it going to take for concerned and engaged citizens to finally feel as though some crucial threshold has been crossed—that our nation’s political system and the global corporate culture it both serves and feeds into will never represent them or serve their needs? Continuing along that line, what’s to be done once that realization has hit home, as it has for authors Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen? Both Hedges and Jensen offer their ideas in this July 5 [2010] interview with Mount Royal University professor Michael Truscello.

This audio is really worth listening to. 

Hedges and Jensen were asked why, despite the development of skillful alternative media, there didn’t seem to be much of an effect on the consolidation of corporate media and the consolidation of the messages.

 Here’s the beginning of Chris Hedges’ response (17:09 into the audio):

“We’re arguably the most illusioned culture or society on the planet.  We believe this childish mantra which is fed to us across the political and cultural spectrum, which says that we can have anything we want, that reality is not an impediment to what we desire.  All we have to do is find our inner strength or focus on happiness or dig deep enough within ourselves or grasp that we are truly exceptional or believe that Jesus really can carry out miracles. . . This . . . keeps the mass of the population in a perpetual infantilism where they never grow up.  What’s happening now is that the illusion of who we are, the illusion of where we are going, and the reality - that gap is widening to such an extent so that as collapse begins to appear, and it is beginning to appear as 2.8 million Americans lost their homes last year to bank repossessions and foreclosures.  That’s 8,000 people a day.  Over 2.4 million will this year [2010].  Half of all bankruptcies are caused by inability to pay for medical bills.

As this gap opens up and we confront personal disintegration as well as ecological and economic disintegration, we’re not prepared emotionally, psychologically, or intellectually for what’s happening.  And so we react as children. Which is to reach out for a demagogue or a savior.  Somebody who promises new glory, moral renewal, and vengeance.  And then I think . . . we could swiftly revert to a much more classical form of totalitarianism, although this would not in any way disrupt the engines of globalism and corporate power.”  [to hear the full interview]

It's this sort of thing that the cryptoquote from yesterday seems to encapsulate for me:

"Reality is that which, when you stop 

believing in it, doesn't go away"

Exactly what Hedges is saying - enough people in our country believe in illusions that are disconnected from reality, but the consequences of not believing in reality won't go away.  So, despite people's beliefs in American exceptionalism, their own right to the American dream, that Jesus will make things good, the consequences of economic (losing their homes and savings) and environmental reality (increasing severe weather disasters) don't stop. 

Reality Is That Which . . .

This post combines a profound quote by one of the most prolific science fiction authors and the challenge of the daily cryptoquote.  These puzzles, which simply substitute one letter in the alphabet for another, mimic the mystery of the world just waiting to be discovered.  I look at these each morning - thanks to Dot Case who had a cryptoquote blog, but it seems to have gone, but her current blog format makes me realize I need to play around more with new things available on Blogspot - and look at mystery.  But slowly, or sometimes quickly, I can think through the mystery and discover the code.  And the hidden quote. 

So often, everything you need to know is in front of you in plain sight, you just need to pay attention to the clues to figure it out.  Things that look totally indecipherable make perfect sense to those who know the code or know logic and deduction.  And every day when I do the cryptoquote I relearn that truism.

So here's today's cryptoquote from the Anchorage Daily News:

[I've filled out the first line, so if you want to work it out all yourself, cover up my answers without looking at them.)

I've left the instructions in to help those of you who have never tried one of these. I found this one a little harder than most, but with it started you should be able to figure it out.
You may want to just copy it down so you can write out the answer more easily.


Everyone has Sherlock Holmes' ability to deduce from the evidence. But not too many train that part of the brain very hard. Imagine all the time spent learning to play basketball or golf or video games spent on learning to solve mysteries! But anything you learn to do well is also teaching you to see things you didn't see before. An avid football fan sees all sorts of things in each play that a novice misses totally. The trick is to transfer that understanding of the complexity of one field to another. That is, to recognize the complexity in a field you know well, also exists in a field you know nothing about. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely dismiss things in fields they know nothing about, assuming their smarts in one arena carry over to another. Of course, none of you know any of those people.

Once you get the quote figured out, think about how profound it is. Think about all the ways it applies in our world. Think about, say, that quote about how women who are raped don't get pregnant. Think about climate change. Think about Obamacare. Have fun.

Keeping Repaired

Spending time lately on repairs.   



Our furnace had a new problem and was leaking.   From the blue tank.  One guy came out Saturday to help dry up the floor and another guy came Monday to put the new release tank on.









My watch band broke and I bought a new band.  But I couldn't manage, even with a small screw driver, to release the spring bars that hole the band to the watch.  So I looked online to see how much the right tool would cost.  It wasn't much - under $5.  Shipping bumped it up over $10. 

Digital watches can be pretty inexpensive, but it just seems silly to have to buy a new one because the band breaks.  It was so easy to fix with this baby.  







My van's battery was dead when we got home after sitting at our neighbors for almost
three months.  When the ice that held the rear driver's side tire tightly to the ground melted, we jumped it, I drove it, and parked it.  And a few days later it was dead again.  So, with summer coming up I scheduled a service for the whole van and today we jumped it again and took it in to be serviced.  I'm hoping to get some pre-bus Denali time in. 

And the cold I'd fought down in LA, had lingered and flared up again.  (Didn't want to be too graphic, so took this picture which I kind of like, but not sure how many people can figure it out.)

Dr. Schwartz, my incredible doctor for probably 30 years, maybe a few more even, retired last summer.  I've been thinking I should meet the new doc before I really needed him.  Wanted him to know who I was.  And let him know how much Dr. S spoiled me.  He'd already heard that from every other patient he'd inherited.  Well, he thought I could heal without taking anything - my preference anyway - and so I have to start working harder to get rid of this thing.  I asked to take a picture so I could remember what he looked like - that part of my brain that remembers faces is also in need of repair - and I promised not to post it, so I've photoshopped it. 






And, finally, if I were still in my 20's maybe these jeans would be ok like this.  But I think that's pushing things for a geezer.  But they were really comfortable. 

It turns out there are lots and lots of videos online that show ways to patch holes like this. 
The one I first found used a spray adhesive and an iron.  J took over this project and ended up with a liquid adhesive.  These jeans have years left in them now. 


There's more stuff that needs repairing or uncluttering or just doing which is making blogging harder - unless I blog about things like this. 

UAA Hockey Coach Search Gets Saturation Coverage, Chancellor Search Was Ignored

When the University of Alaska Anchorage sought a Chancellor several of years ago, the Anchorage Daily News, as I recall, ignored the story completely.  The head of the whole campus, the dominant institution of higher education, a major economic and cultural driver of the city, the region, and state even, was searching for a CEO, and no one paid attention except a blogger and the school newspaper.

But when it comes time to hire a hockey coach and the Daily News is all over the story:

UAA names 4 finalists for hockey coach position

Corbett states his case to take over at UAA

Prospective UAA hockey coach cites work with legends   

Prospective UAA hockey coach cites work with legends

Ex-UAA assistant ready to take over Seawolves

Utica's Heenan wants to rebuild UAA

UAA puts search for hockey coach on hold to revamp committee

UAA suspends search for head hockey coach
Heenan, Brown still interested in UAA hockey job



Even the Denver Post and, gasp, the Wall Street Journal covered this search.

Say, maybe they would have paid more attention to the Chancellor search if they had realized that the Chancellor is responsible for hiring a hockey coach. 

Global Weirdness, First Person Shooter Games, Irish Traditional Music, And More New Books

I picked up some books at the UAA library and couldn't help but check out the new books on display.  Here's a sampling.  If the title didn't seem obvious I've added some the publisher's description (trying to leave out the hype) so you get an inkling of what the book is about.

text from here

“‘First person shooters’ are one of the most fundamental and important videogame genres. Many critiques of this type of game have been put forth by those with little experience of actual game play. Voorhees, Call, and Whitlock include here essays that explore the gengre [sic] in specific and useful detail from the perspective of the expert player. The essays are nuanced, carefully researched and supported critiques of specific aspects of first-person shooters. James Manning’s analysis of the heads-up display in Team Fortress 2 and Gwyneth Peaty’s discussion of the permability of avatar bodies in Bioshock are especially strong. Summing Up: Recommended. All Readers.” – E. Bertozzi, Long Island University, CHOICE

This is a huge book.

Winter's not letting go - Citizens Climate Change Meeting

 

I'm downtown at the Kaladi Brothers where the Citizen Climate Lobby meeting is now hooked into the national audio conference with the other 90+ local chapters to hear US Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) who has introduced the Carbon Tax Bill in the Senate. 

People got here late in part because of the weather, but mostly because the bus departure point for the USS Anchorage commissioning is the Dena'ina Center and there are NO parking places anywhere downtown, even at 8:30am on a Saturday.  

Senator Whitehouse is talking now so I'm going to listen.  

The Sun, Not The Temperature, Says Summer Is Near

The sun was hovering along the horizon angling north and down about 9:30 pm last Saturday.






But the temperatures are cooler than normal and Thursday people were waiting in the cold - and by then grey weather - to get a shuttle bus to tour the USS Anchorage.  The line went up one lane of the parking lot, down another and wound around a few more times near where the bus was supposed to pick people up.  It would have been interesting to see the ship close up, but when they estimated three hours to get on the bus, we left.  We had other things to do.

Why War? Why Not Big Projects? Wally Hickel - The Movie

I got an email invite to see the premiere of "Alaska, the World, and Wally Hickel" from Paul Brown.  I thought back to a meeting I had with Paul some years ago.  He was up here just starting the film. . . and now it was done.

So I looked up the old post to show the beginning of this project and it turns out my memory is very vulnerable to suggestion.  We met in April 2009, but he was up here scouting out Alaska for a Common Cause chapter.   Good thing I have a blog to keep me grounded.  But I also saw him since then and he must of told me he was working on this project. 

portrait of Wally Hickel

Wally Hickel is bigger than life here in Alaska.  I first heard of him before coming here - when Nixon made him his Secretary of Interior.  He surprised us all when he wrote a letter to Nixon after students were shot by the National Guard at Kent State.  (One of the people interviewed claims to be the person who leaked the letter to the press. Based on the others interviewed, this may well have been a new revelation.) When I got to Alaska he was businessman Hickel again, but jumped into the Governor's race as an independent in 1990 after Arliss Sturgulewski won the Republican nomination.  She would have been the first woman governor and a good one.  But Hickel took the election.

My opinion of Hickel went back and forth and toward the end, when he began talking about the Owner State and getting strongly involved in pushing communication and exchange among Arctic Nations, he showed a leadership, passion, vision, and integrity that Alaskans, and the nation, need more of.

The movie reflected this hard to pin down Alaskan.  It more than hinted at weaknesses - portraying him as a man who didn't read much (he was dyslexic it said), as an impulsive decision maker, over confident (various people said he "believed his own stories"), and that he loved attention.   Overall though, this is a very positive portrait.  

Was he just lucky he got to Alaska when the opportunities were good for a charismatic young man who who could work hard?  I think that helped a lot.  Probably in a more established city and state he might have been lost in the crowd.  But the movie also portrayed him as making people feel good to be around him, as having an infectious enthusiasm that made people believe in his projects, and a perseverance and self confidence that made things work out.

I think the movie spent a little too much time on his departure from the Nixon administration and omits any explanation of how or why an apparently healthy young man in the early 1940's managed to stay in Alaska to start his career instead of enlisting or being drafted to fight in World War II.

Was there a health reason?  Was he a draft dodger?  A secret pacifist?  The National Governor's Association website bio of Hickel says,

"During World War II, he served as a civilian flight maintenance inspector for the Army Air Corps."

Is there something here that would help explain his support of the anti-war activists during the Vietnam war? 

Executive Producer of the film, Ken Mandel, in an introduction to the film said they only had 60 minutes to cover a lifetime and they had to make choices.  He also offered the Hickel quote about war in the title of this post, which further tickles my curiosity about this.


No film or book can tell the whole story of a man.  Others need to fill in other aspects and other details.  This is a reasonable film that celebrates the things Hickel did well, hints at some of the flaws, and left me pondering the differences between those who take action after careful analysis and those who think after they act.  (The movie mentions the Hickel highway he had built through the tundra to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields that destroyed the permafrost and had to be abandoned to hopeless summer mud, leaving a scar across the landscape with an unmentioned pricetag.)  The Hickel portrayed in the movie seems to be a man with great integrity, great vision, and great confidence in his own greatness.

I talked to Paul Brown after the film and in this very short video, you get a sense of how Hickel affected people. (This is also about as close as I've ever had the camera to someone's face. I'm not sure how this happened. Sorry Paul.)





It was fitting that the movie premiered in a ball room of the Captain Cook Hotel, a hotel Hickel built in downtown Anchorage shortly after the 1964 earthquake to show confidence in Anchorage's recovery.  And it's still a world class hotel.  

The film will be on shown on Alaska Public television (KAKM, KTOO, and KYUK) on May 9, 2013 at 7:00 pm.  In Fairbanks (KUAC) on May 26. 

"Warren [Buffet] is in the house"

30 minutes ago Warren Buffet (@WarrenBuffet) posted his first Tweet.  He already has 30,000 followers - 1000 per minute.

How do I know this?  Because I follow Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) and he just posted about it. 

Let's see, I (@whisper2world) sent my first tweet 2 weeks ago and I have 14 followers.

Does this make me a better person?  In any way?  I'm still trying to figure it out.  It does mean that I'm aware of a lot more that I don't know about and so I have a lot more opportunity costs.  

A potential upside relates to the conference I'm going to at the end of May.  I proposed a discussion on a particular topic and the conference committee has suggested that we do a lot of this via twitter.  I'll see how that goes.

But I'm concerned that a lot of Twitter is about saying things faster.  But I'm not sure we need to know them faster, and in many cases, know them at all.  Was Warren Buffet merely experimenting by saying his physical location or was this a metaphoric way of saying he was on Twitter?  I don't think it matters either way.  And, to the extent that people spend time looking at Twitriva, they will spend less time gaining in-depth understanding of important issues. 

This juror is still out.

[UPDATE May 3, 2013 12:48am - Warren Buffet's second tweet links to a CNN piece he wrote on why he's bullish on women.  He also now has 1/4 of a million followers. His new members per minute rate is slowing down.]

Why People Don't Learn - What You Don't Know You Know Can Hurt You

It became quickly clear in class as I began teaching graduate students that many had no sense of the tools people use to learn about their subject matter and the world.  Theory, for many of them, was simply the opposite of practice: what academics do, but impractical in the 'real world.'

My first job was to get them to realize that everything they did was guided by some sort of model or low level theory.  They had to understand that we really can't do anything purposeful in the world if we don't have, at the least, simple models of cause and effect relationships.  The models didn't have to be conscious, but somewhere in their brains are explanations of how the world works which guide our actions.  Things like:

• Saying please and thank you will make it easier to get things.
• If you turn on your turn indicator, the car next to you will give you space to change lanes.
• A spanking will teach your child not to do something you disapprove of.
• Drinking water will quench your thirst.
• Yelling will cause people to do what you want.  
• If you work hard, you will succeed

The models are often very simple and incomplete or downright wrong.  But without some sort of models somewhere in your head, all your actions would simply be random.  Think about it.  

I learned that I had to teach my students to pay attention to their own conceptions of what we were studying - power, bureaucracy, human behavior, decision making, ethics, etc. - before they could seriously consider alternatives offered them in the 'literature.'

The students' own theories, however unformed or unarticulated, blocked their ability to engage the theories they were reading in their graduate studies.

One day, I went to a presentation at UAA by a Dr. Tom Angelo who was doing research on assessing learning.  His research team had been interviewing Ivy League science students about basic concepts in science.  They found the students came to college with misconceptions.  The example that stuck with me was asking students why the earth has seasons.  A significant number replied that the earth was further from the sun in the winter. [Think about that a second.] They’d come into college with this misconception and, despite being science students at top schools, left college with their misconceptions intact. (Here's a video - A Private Universe -  on that study.)

You needed to get the students to engage their preconceptions and make them conscious so they can examine them, Angelo said.  Otherwise they won't learn.  

This was very reassuring to me because I had found the same problem with my students.  They may not be aware of their preconceptions, but if they were in conflict with what we were studying, they couldn't engage the material.

Fast forward.  I'm currently writing a paper arguing, in part, that the graduate schools for students studying administration should start by explicitly focusing on what's inside the students' heads before looking at what's out in the world.  After all, we need to examine the models we are using already (often unconsciously) to make decisions before we tackle what others are writing about the same topics.  And my students - studying public administration - all had preconceptions of most of the subjects we studied.

I wanted to find the research Prof. Angelo had been referring to.  So I googled him and couldn't find an email, but he's on linkedin.  I sent a request to link with him and told him, in the request, what I was looking for.  The next day I got an email back linking me to a video on the Ivy League science study and a suggestion to look for "research on misconceptions in science."

That got me to the library and I found exactly what I need in the National Research Council's 2000 report How People Learn:  Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.  They had this Key Finding:

"1:  Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works.  If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom." 

Bingo!


As I think about this now, new things become clear.  I've been aware for many years that there were students who showed up in our program who'd been in government or non-profit organizations for a long time and had, on their own, developed conceptions that were pretty much on the mark.  As they read the course materials all sorts of bells and whistles went off as they recognized their, often unarticulated, concepts with lots of extra details filled in that they hadn't gotten on their own.  These students were enjoying class and doing well.  What they already had figured out to a degree by themselves was being confirmed.  Parts that were still confusing were being explained.

But there were students who really hadn't reflected very much on what was happening around them at work.  Or they had reflected, but inaccurately, and these students with misconceptions were having a much harder time.  What they read didn't make sense to them.  For many it was because their faulty preconceptions blocked their ability to understand the material.  For others, they just didn't have an aptitude for this subject.  And others simply didn't work hard enough. 

I'd added a section to my intro graduate public administration class called "Ways of Knowing" where we explored terms like 'theory' and learned some vocabulary and concepts that would help us discuss students' preconceptions as we went through different topics.  My syllabus said explicitly that I wanted them to examine their own models and compare them to what we were studying.

Some students would simply complain about the reading.  It was wrong.  They knew better than the authors.  I recognize that in some classes students are exposed to incorrect models and their challenges are valid.  Some, but not most.  But, with this in mind, I got to the point where I'd tell complaining students,

"If you know better, write down your model of this and then show why it is a better one than what you read in the literature.  Then we'll send it in to some journals and you'll be famous.  But first you need to articulate your model, verify any claims you make, and then you need to know exactly what this writer is saying so you can critique it."

They would begin to understand how much more work the other person had put into this concept than they had.

This is nothing really new or fringe.  Peter Senge, whose Fifth Discipline was one of the best selling and most influential management books of all times wrote:

"Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.  Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior.   .  .  Mental models of what can or cannot be done in different management settings are no less deeply entrenched.  Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models.  

“The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inwards:  learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.  It also includes the ability to carry on “learningful” conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others.”  (Senge, p. 8) 

People understand this conceptually. Develop "critical thinking skills" and "ability to do analysis and synthesis"  are listed as key competencies for graduate administration degrees, but a lot of faculty don't know exactly how to do this.  It isn't the focus of a particular class.  It's supposed to happen as a side-effect of studying the actual subject.  Or students are supposed to already know this when they arrive.  But they don't.  And most students won't get this unless you make them look inward and find their internal, unconscious models of the world.

'Ways of Knowing' is an underlying theme of this blog and why it's called "What Do I Know?"  What do you know?


I need to point out that I had the luxury of small graduate classes where I could assign a lot of short papers over the semester and grade them in detail. I got feedback on how well the students were doing (and thus how I was doing) and they got lots of feedback from me.  By reading their papers I could begin to discover their unspoken models and help the students start to see them and articulate them.  Then critique them.  Faculty with larger classes simply can't give their students the kind of detailed feedback I could.  So they didn't assign as many written papers.  And students didn't get the kind of education we all need.