The Bergdahl Rorhschach Test

[Lots of  people leave a movie before the credits are over.  And sometimes the director saves some great stuff for the end of the credits.  This is a post that has some related, but only in a very tangential way, content at the end.  But I think it's worth waiting for.]

[UPDATE June 9, 2014 Anchorage Daily News reporter Rich Mauer offers more detail to the Bergdahl Rohrschach with his interview with four Anchorage soldier's in Bergdahl's unit today.]

Original Rohrschach image from here, but see notes below*

The commentary on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl reminds me a lot of a Rohrshach test.  In a Rorschach:

[t]he underlying assumption is that an individual will class external stimuli based on person-specific perceptual sets, and including needs, base motives, conflicts, and that this clustering process is representative of the process used in real-life situations.^[33] [From Wikipedia]

And we see all sorts of folks 'seeing' in Bergdahl (the external stimulus) radically different things, based, I'm assuming, on those  "person-specific perceptual sets, and including needs, base motives, conflicts."


Some of the things people see in the Bergdahl Rohrschach:

• Traitor
• Confused Young Man
• Sane Young Man Who Reacted To The Insanity Of War
• Means To Trash The President
• Republicans Acting Bad Once More
• Chance To Empty Guantanamo
• US Commitment To Recover all POWs
• Negotiating With Terrorists
• Innocent Until Proven Guilty
• All Our Soldiers Are Hereos

The traditional Rohrschach Test has very specific techniques for interpreting people's responses.  There are different methods:  The Exner method and the Rohrschach Performance Assessment System seem to be the two major ones.   Wikipedia goes through the basic inkblots and standard interpretations.  And there's even a section on conflicts among the testers over interpretation.

Frustrated with people's seemingly mindless interpretation of current events?  Think of the current event as a sort of Rohrschach test. 

In looking at Rohrschahs,  psychologists looks at more than just what the testers 'see' in the inkblots.  They also look at how they approach the task - for instance, do they take it as given to them or do they ask if they can turn the cards around?  They listen to how the person forms the interpretation.

And we should do the same too.

Everyone's response will be a combination of the respondent's preconceived notions of how the world works and the evidence presented.  The less connected to the facts of the case, the more the response tells us about the respondent than about the case, the more the respondents are projecting their world views, their values, their biases onto the case. 

But none of this is new to most of you reading this. Perhaps for some it's a different metaphor for thinking about this.

The real questions we have to find ways to answer are:

1.   How do we form our 'judgment habits'?  (Yes, they're habits.)  How do we learn to go from evidence to conclusion?   To what extent is this affected by genetics and to what extent by environment? 
2.  How do we learn to balance feelings and rational thinking to improve the likelihood of coming to more accurate assessments?
3.  What causes some of us to short circuit and shut down one side or the other - rationality without any feeling or feeling without any rationality?

I know you can all think of examples of people rationally going through the evidence before they make their conclusions known.   And you know people whose instant conclusion pops out of their mouths as soon as the first tiny bit of (possibly false) evidence is presented.

But sometimes the people that mouth off quickly, loudly, and arrogantly without waiting for all the evidence are right.  And the people who deliberately exam every detail sometimes turn out to be wrong.  A lot goes into 'getting it right' than just these two dimensions. 

There are lots of directions this post could go.  I really wanted to just raise the idea of current events being like Rohrschach inkblots, we learn more about the people talking than about the issue. 

But as I did that, I also started thinking about the wide array of factors that affect good and bad interpretations.  And after barely touching that, I'm already thinking about how we deal with people who aren't rational or who ignore feelings.   But I'm not ready to put all those ingredients together into a satisfying post yet. 
 
So let me conclude this post with a little seriousness and a little silliness.

*Images (the serious part)

I spent a more time on the images (there's one below too) than I did on actually writing.  Like the two here, most images I use here are originals I create.  But if I use someone else's images (even if I alter them as in this post), I like to give credit.  I found the Rohrschach image using google image search.  But my source clearly wasn't the original, but that site didn't cite its source.  Google reverse image search gave me over 500 locations for the image.  I passed on finding the real original site. I  really don't want to link to a site that used an image without giving credit - and I'm not that impressed with the post the image was in. 

Hermann Rohrshach (the silly part) 

When I was looking up the Rohrschach test, I found a picture of Hermann Rohrschach on Wikipedia.  I was surprised at how young and contemporary - and cool - he looked.  According to Wikipedia,

  "in 1921 he wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test."

He was was born in November 1888, so he was probably 38 when the book came out.  In April 1922, again according to Wikipedia:

"he died of  peritonitis, probably resulting from a ruptured appendix.^[9]"

He left a wife and two children, ages five and three.  Below is his picture and the actor it made me think (another Rohrschach like test?) should play him in the movie of his life.

Hermann and Matt

Hermann's picture is the way I found it.  It took a little time to find a picture of Matt Damon in a reasonably similar pose.  Then I changed it to black and white, got rid of the background, shrank it, and added the mustache.   I think they'd seem more alike  if you didn't see the pictures side-by-side.  As I look at the two now, I know that readers will think of other actors who look much more like Hermann. 

Birch Shield Bug Close Up

I used the Photoshop Sketch - Water Paper filter only for the background.  I left the bug and leaf alone.  Except where the edges merged with the background, they're the original photo.

I posted a picture of the birch shield bug in 2011 with a description from Dominque M/ Collet's Insects of south-central Alaska.  Yes, it's really called a bug.  Elasmostethus interstinctus if you want to be formal.

I'm proud of myself.  I didn't look at the computer until 3pm today.  Puttering around in the yard was good. 

If you have an Alaska bug you can't identify, the Cooperative Extension Service has a form you can submit online or in person.

By the way, here's a site that has pictures of a lot of different shield bugs.

Charter College Graduation And Lady In Blue

I have a friend.  I went to his Charter College graduation in 2010, at the Performing Art Center.  Except that after he 'graduated', he was he still had two more classes to take.  Over time that escalated to four and then six classes.  I know this because I went with him several times when he spoke to a counselor and then a higher level administrator.

But he finally got this all completed and we went to graduation again Friday night. 

Here's the President talking to the grads with the faculty in the background. 

Here's a grad getting his diploma.

I'm thinking lots of thoughts, but it's late and I need to go to bed.  It did make me wish the Regents hadn't eliminated the Community College system. 

And the lady in blue.  Well, I took the picture down.  She wore a very short skirt and very high heels walking out of the PAC.  I found myself debating whether I should post the picture or not and decided that if I have a question, I should not post it.  While I took the picture in a public place and you can't see her face, I didn't ask her permission.  I'm still trying to articulate my gut feeling and I can't yet.  

Why I Live Here - Breakfast on the Deck

The best room in the house isn't in the house.  It's our summer extra room - on the deck.  Here's what I saw when I looked at the ceiling while I ate breakfast this morning.

 Here's one of the walls.  














OK, I can see a little more than trees, but it's a bit of wooded paradise on a normal city lot right in the middle of town.  It helps that there's a hill, but otherwise, it's just that no one cut the trees in the back ever.  We too have just left it natural.  And we've added trees on the sides to keep a little green summer oasis in the city.  It's also relatively low maintenance.


And they say it's good for our mental health. 

六四 June 4

Learning the months is one of the few things in Chinese that's easy.  It's simply month 1, month 2, month 3, etc.  Saying dates can get abbreviated to simply the number of the month and the date.

Today is 6-4, Liù Sì  (approximately Leo Si - like sir but without the r sound at the end, and they're both falling tone, the falling tone you'd use when you just remembered you forgot something you need and you say "shit!")

I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989 for a year sabbatical, so this is all very fresh in my mind, even 25 years later.  When we planned a trip with students to Beijing the following spring, we scheduled it so we were back in Hong Kong a couple of weeks before the first anniversary.   Here's a picture of Tiananmen Square in May 1990.

Tiananmen Square May 1990

Someone who did not want to be displayed here was standing right in front.  So I used the rubberstamp function in Photoshop to erase history.  It seemed appropriate because the Chinese government is trying to erase the memory of June 4, 1989.  Note there's a shadow across the bottom of the photo.  I decided that while I took the person out, I'd leave the shadow. 


Louisa Lim has just written a book called The People's Republic of Amnesia.  You can hear her talk about the erasure of this historic day on NPR here.


It just seems necessary to remember today, because in China this day officially does not exist.

Compulsive Maybe? Rumors, Learning Chinese, Everything Avocado, and Bedbugs - Stuff I Found Online

Before

1.    The Art of Cleanup at typograffit can be called a reordering of the everyday or the work of a control freak.  Maybe both.  But it makes you rethink things we take for granted.    There's a series of before and after pictures.  Here's an example.  It's basically pictures and quick and easy.  But you'll be surprised at what she does.

After Image from The Art of Cleanup at typograffit

 2.   Snopes - Rumor has it  is a fact checking site.  In this post they look at a video that purports to show President Obama in Russia sticking his hand out to Russian officials but no one will take it.  Then they show the actual footage that was left out that changes everything. 



3.   From  How Clever Design Can Help You Learn Chinese   on Slate.

How to remember the characters for fire, tree, sun, and moon.  And lots more characters. 

4.   Things you didn't know you could do with an avocado.  29 Next-Level Things To Do With Avocado . From brownies to baked eggs and a lot more recipes I think (emphasis on think) want to try.

 5.  Worried about bedbugs when you travel?  Bedbug Reports shows you reports by folks who found bedbugs in their hotel.  You can check out cities and specific hotels.   

[6/4/14 - I'm reposting this because feedburner didn't seem to pick it up when I posted it yesterday. Let's see if it works this time][It did.]

An Article Most White Americans Don't Want To Read

Anyone who believes that African-Americans are economically poorer than White Americans because they are somehow inferior to whites - don't work as hard, not as smart, whatever -  don't read this article.  It will disabuse you of your misconceptions.  It will force you to face the reality of how, even after slavery ended, after separate but equal ended, housing practices ensured that most African-Americans would live in ghettos and could not share in the economic benefits White Americans got through home ownership.

This is not an article for bigots.  Their hate isn't based on facts and won't be changed by facts.

It is an article for those who believe in freedom and equality and justice, but just don't know their history that well.  It's easy for them not to, because it wasn't taught in most schools.

It is an article for those who have a sense of the injustices and can always use supporting data for when they are talking to people who don't get it.   From The Atlantic.

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. 

Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

This is not easy reading.  It hurts too much.  Some excerpts:

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

Coates follows the life of Clyde Ross and explains the mechanics of how it was impossible for his family to get a fair deal for their crops and labor from the white dealers who set the prices and were backed up by the local power structure.  Blacks who protested the non-negotiable terms were Bilboed.  How despite Clyde Ross being recommended by one of his teachers to go to a special school set up to help Southern black kids, it was too far to walk and there were no busses for black kids.  How he gets drafted and shipped to California where he experiences a relatively open society, serves in Guam, and on returning moves north to Chicago.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Why would he take a loan on such bad terms?  Well, he was denied the kind of education that might have helped prevent it.  And he was lied to by the agents - who were really the owners and who steered him (and countless others) to attorneys who worked with the agent/owners. And he couldn't get a legitimate loan.

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

We're still reaping the harvest of these evil practices.  This is an easy way to pick up on some of this history that doesn't normally get taught in school.  

I know that most Americans recoil at the idea of paying reparations to blacks.  It's not because terrible things didn't happen.  We know they did.  But how, some would ask, could we possible afford to make reparations?  And who would we pay?  The slaves have all died.

The fact that most White Americans oppose the idea reflects - whether they acknowledge this or not - they understand that African-Americans are owed so much.  But Germans have given reparations to holocaust survivors - and Germany is still one of the most prosperous nations on earth.  The US gave reparations to Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during WW II simply for being of Japanese descent.  What they got was merely a token, but a big part of that payment included the explicit acknowledgment of the wrong committed.  There is no way that blacks would ever be justly compensated, but there are lots of possible ways of making some sort of reparations that acknowledge how much their people have contributed to America's prosperity while being denied their fair share.

The article, as it gets to the idea of reparations, says pretty much the same thing, only more brutally.

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.

The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

As I said, true bigots won't read this and if they did it wouldn't change anything for them.  But the rest of America should. And talk about it.

Here's the link again to The Atlantic article.

How To Stop Your Cottonwood Tree From Shedding Cotton

OK, this is a longshot.  But we had some wind yesterday and I found this on my deck.  I'd never actually paid attention to these before.

These are the young pods that will eventually grow into the big cotton puffs that will make a huge mess over the deck and the yard and, for some, make breathing hard.  I took this picture yesterday and today the pods had already started opening in the kitchen.  (Those little balls are about the side of very big peas.)  Why not just look through the tree and cut all these off before they ever open and spread their cotton?


So I went out today with the tree trimmer and I realize that I couldn't find them in the tree, and probably, if I could, they are so high up that I could never reach them.  Cleaning them up after the fact is probably easier.  But if anyone has a trained monkey, it could work. 

BTW, one of my posts that still gets lots of hits is on uses cottonwood cotton.

U of Alaska Joins Ranks of Top Universities - US Investigates How They Handle Sexual Assault

Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Michigan were among 55 colleges and universities listed by the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights on May 1, 2014, as under investigation for possible violations for how they handle sexual violence and harassment complaints.

The University of Alaska system was not on that list.  But not to worry.  Alaskans are as bad as the rest of the country, maybe even worse, in how we handle sexual assault and violence and Wednesday, May 28, the University of Alaska system and four other institutions were added to the list.  From the Huffington Post:

Since releasing the [original] list, the department has launched Title IX investigations at the University of Alaska system, the University of Delaware, Elmira College in New York, the University of Akron in Ohio and Cisco Junior College in Texas. This brings the total number of schools with federal probes to 60.  [emphasis added]
The department did not elaborate on whether the five new inquiries are proactive investigations or come in response to specific complaints.

Alaska is frequently not taken seriously, so I'm pleased that the Department of Education does recognize that in this area our University does deserve their attention, even if we got listed almost a month later than the others.

NOTE:  For folks who read my sarcasm as making a joke out of this, I'd point out that humor is one of the ways folks deal with serious problems.   In no way do I mean to make light of this situation.  I'm sorry that the US Department of Education has enough cause to include Alaska on the list.  But, given that we have the highest rates of rape in the country,  those fighting sexual assault in Alaska should be glad the Department will look into this.  Even our governor, who generally is opposed to federal intervention in Alaska.  But our governor has pledged

"that Alaska would take every step necessary to stop the epidemic of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse in Alaska. "

I hope that means supporting a federal investigation that adds resources to help fight domestic violence and sexual assault in Alaska. 

Maybe the Feds will review the dismissal of the complaint at UAF this year. The original issue of the student's name being published seems moot given she wanted it published, but how the University handled the case and the impact on the campus climate and students' feelings of safety should be reviewed.

If anyone wants information about those fighting intimate partner violence and sexual assault and/or need help, go to the website of ANDVSA (Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault)

Power Outage: Just Your House Or Whole Neighborhood?

At night, of course, you can just look out the window and see if the neighbors lights are out too.  But it’s summer in Alaska and we don’t have much night.  And the power went out in the middle of the morning. 

But as my wifi connection stopped, I realized I could check to see if any of the other 20 or so wifi signals that show up on my computer were there too.  Two were there for a little longer than the rest, then they disappeared too. 

Actually, it has been fairly windy, so I assumed it wasn’t just our house.  But the wifi signal check is something I hadn’t thought of before.  And now the outage is about two hours and my old Macbook battery is running low. 

So, I’ll post this when the power goes back on and I get reconnected to the wifi. 

It was out for just about three hours.  Got done a number of things that I've been trying to avoid.