San Francisco - Dog Sitting and Other Odd Jobs

Dog sitter, laundry, pickup service - our jobs today were to take care of things while they are still waiting to come home from the hospital.  J got to have some baby holding work too.  Here are some shots, mostly from walking the dog.

Here's a San Francisco liquor store.

And the fire escape above it.

Utility workers installing fiber optic cable. 

A typical San Francisco Victorian house, atypically reflecting back the sunshine on a warm day.  It was cooler in the afternoon when the breeze picked up.

















Lavender patch in the dog park.

I'm not sure what Kona knows about the little brother coming home any day now.

View of the city from B's hospital room. 

We also had to stop at a high end baby store to get an insert for a stroller someone had given them.  This is one of those industries spawned by regulation, that conservatives hate so much.  And lots of lives have been saved.  But I also think that in some cases both the industry and parents have gotten a little carried away.  Like the   stroller in the store for over $1000.

 

University of Alaska Anchorage Offers Title IX Training To All Employees

Recently I posted that the University of Alaska system was one of 60 colleges and universities around the country on a list for investigation of violations of Title IX.

Recently UAA chancellor Tom Case sent out emails to all faculty and staff asking them to participate in a Title IX training session.  His goal is 100% participation.

Training was scheduled to begin this week in Anchorage while most faculty are off contract and probably off campus if not out of state.  A large percentage of the UAA faculty are adjunct faculty, meaning they are hired to teach one, two, or three classes on a semester by semester contract.  They aren't full time employees of the university. 

Provisions have been made for people to participate through teleconference.  The training is 90 minutes.


Interview with Director Title IX Coordinator

I spoke with Marva Watson who is the UAA Title IX Coordinator.  But that's just one of her hats under the larger umbrella (I guess this metaphor is going to be one about being well protected from rain, not quite what I intended) of Director, Campus Diversity & Compliance.  The Title IX Coordinator is NOT a new position set up in response to this new Department of Education investigation.  Watson's had that title for two years.  She also has two investigators working for her who will be doing the training -  Jerry Trew and Stephanie Whaley -  and they've been doing that for a couple of years now.  
The training will basically cover 

• Understand nature of the no tolerance policy
• Responsible parties, how to report.
• Bystander intervention
• What constitutes consent

 Some of this information is already online.  There is, for example, a flow chart for someone who has been assaulted, showing the steps and options for making a report or just talking to someone.

There's a similar flow chart for UAA employees to report incidents of student misconduct or harassment.  Though I think the title is a little misleading.  The chart is for helping students who have been harassed, not for reporting incidents or perpetrators.  It also leaves me wondering if the procedure is the same or different for employees who have been assaulted or harassed.  (I hadn't looked at these before I talked to Watson, so I didn't get to ask her and I'm supposed to head to the hospital and see my new gbaby soon, so I'm not going to check now.  My quick peek yesterday was a tonic for all the world's ills.)

I did have a list of questions to ask, but Watson answered a couple of them before I even asked.

1.  She knows that faculty are off contract right now.
2.  There will be more training in August when faculty come back on contract.

She also said that the UAA training is all being done in-house, so there is no extra cost to bring in trainers, though, of course, there is the cost of everyone's time.  All three campuses (UAA, UAF, and UAS) are undergoing training, but each campus is working out its own approach.

This new push is related to the federal Title IX investigation, but Watson stressed that this sort of training has been ongoing.  There will be an attempt to get as many people trained as is possible, but it's not mandatory.  

I also asked if students got this training and Watson said that it's part of new student orientation. 

I was hoping that I could sit in on one of the trainings before posting this, but it's turned out I am traveling this week I'm just not going to be able to connect to the online training today either.   Here's the whole schedule for now. 

I do believe that the Chancellor is taking this seriously (his letter is below.)  But I also know that there is training and training. I suspect that it's important to not have talking heads do the training for this.  It needs to be interactive, with good multi-media, and lots of ways to engage the trainees and help them internalize the urgency of the issues and how to respond.  There's also a problem with all race and gender related training.  If it's voluntary, the people who need it most, won't come.  If it's mandatory, the people who need it most will be very resistant.  But in this case maybe that's not the case.  Here,  "those need it most" probably doesn't mean those who think it's a non-issue.  Instead it's really those employees who will have someone come to them in trouble.   And those folks are the ones a student might feel are most sympathetic.   Ones who do get the problem and want to know what to do.

I'm hoping this is just the first step, and my short talk with Watson suggests that's the case. 


Below is the letter.

Dear UAA Community,

At UAA we take pride in promoting a culture of respect and a safe environment for our faculty, staff and students. There is no better way to stop sexual harassment and misconduct than to be informed and educated. Safety is everyone's business at UAA and to that end I am asking all faculty and staff to attend a Title IX training. Trainings begin Monday, June 16.

The United States Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights placed the University of Alaska system on a list of colleges and universities nationwide that will be audited for compliance with Title IX. Many people know of Title IX from athletics, especially its important role bringing about gender equity in sports. But Title IX is more than a sports law, and it aims to bring gender equity to all educational programs, especially through the elimination of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. UAA shares in that goal and welcomes this review, as it will provide us with an opportunity to showcase our efforts and to learn about deficient areas requiring improvement. My ultimate goal is that our students, faculty, and staff are safe and know what services are available if they are sexually harassed or assaulted or if they receive a report of that nature. This review helps us achieve that.

The UAA campus has appointed Marva Watson, as Title IX Coordinator and Dr. Dewain L. Lee, as Deputy Title IX Coordinator. Through their efforts, we have been working to provide Title IX training to our community. This compliance review and its accompanying guidance provide us with extra incentive to train our entire community now.

A schedule of 36 live training sessions begin June 16, some of which are available via videoconferencing. For all dates and registration information click this link: https://uaa.quickbase.com/db/bhf39ifex

Our goal is for 100% of faculty and staff to be trained.

Everyone should feel safe on all of our UAA campuses. Participating in Title IX training is one part of your responsibility to ensure that a culture of safety and equity exists.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Chancellor Tom Case

" . . . there must be a reason, an organizing principle, to each man's life."

Toward the end of Water Music by T. C. Boyle, Ned Rise, one of the two heroes (if you will) of the book is thinking about his future.  He's been trekking into interior Africa and
now for the last couple of months, drifting down the Niger River with Mungo Park, Scottish explorer who was the first European to set eyes on the Niger. Park was trying to find where the river ended.  Here's the narrator on Ned Rise near the end of their journey:

"Homeless, fatherless, with neither prospects nor hope,Ned hs begun to see this bleak, stinking, oppressive continent in a new light, as a place of beginnings as well as endings.  All he's been through these past two years, all the heat and stink and disease, all the suffering and strangeness - it must have some purpose, some hidden meaning, some link to his life.  He is thinking that maybe he won't return to London when they reach the coast.  He'll stay on as a trader, or maybe he'll rest up and then work his way back into the interior, explore on his own, search for whatever it is he's been spared to find."

Ned had been sent to a British army post just off the coast of Africa, because they were short of soldiers and a politician had gotten the notion to send prisoner's there.  And then Park selected from the soldiers.

Park had been born to a decent family, but there were older brothers, and he'd decided to make his fame and fortune by discovering the Niger River, which he did on his first trip to Africa.  On his return, his book and lectures, made him a well known hero in the first decade of the 1800s.  The book traces both their lives, but they don't meet until Park is recruiting men for his second Africa trip. 

They've [Rise and Park] talked, man to man.  Still nights, mist on the water, forty-one men dead and the equatorial moon sitting on their shoulders like an immovable weight, they've talked.  Mungo bared his heart, told him of his marriage, his children, of the pain of separation, of his ambitions.  He talked as if he were talking to himself, for hours at a time, and then, apropos of nothing, he would turn to Ned and ask him how he'd lost his fingers or acquired the scar at his neck - "you know" he'd say, "it almost looks like a rope burn." [It is, he's survived being hanged.]  Ned, his face frank and open, his gaze steady, would lie.  "Butcher shop,"  he'd say, "cutting out steaks."  Or, fingering the scar at this thoat, "Oh, this.  Nothing really.  Got my head caught in an iron fence when I was a kid.  No more than five or six.  They had to fetch the blacksmith to loosen the bars."

Ned Rise continues his musings:

No, worming his way into the explorer's confidence was barely a challenge.  The man was easy, a self-centered fool.  If Ned hadn't got a grip on the reins long ago they'd all be dead by now.  Still he bears the news no malice.  In fact, he's all right in his own way - at least he's committed himself to something.  That's more than Ned can say for himself.  Mungo Park may be conceited, mad with ambition, blind, incompetent, fatuous - but at least he's got a focus for his life, a reason for living.  That's the kernel of truth Ned has dug out of the motherload of the past three weeks of drifting in the sun:  there must be a reason, an organizing principle, to each man's life.   For M'Keal it's booze, for Martyn weapons and bloodshed, for Park it's risking his fool hide to open up he map and get his name inscribed in history books.  And for himself, Ned Rise?  Mere survival isn't enough.  A dog can survive, a flea.  There must be something more.  [emphasis added]

There's also the story of Mungo Park and his young wife who violently opposed Park's taking this second trip to Africa, to the point where he took the cowardly way out and promised her he wouldn't while he was actively working on this second trip. 

Boyle writes in a lush prose that scrapes words onto the page like thick oil on a canvas.  So many words that I had to look up.  Not to be pretentious, I don't think, but because they were the exact word he needed.  But, alas, I didn't mark particularly good passages as I read and finding them isn't easy.  But here's the first paragraph of the book as an example:

At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.  The year was 1795.  George III was dabbing the walls of Windsor Castle with his own spittle, the Notables were botchings things in France, Goya was deaf, DeQuincey a depraved pre-adolescent.  George Bryan "Beau" Brummell was smoothing down his first starched collar, young Ludwig van Beethoven, beetle-browed and twenty-four, was wowing them in Vienna with his Piano Concerto no. 2, and Ned Rise was drinking Strip-Me-Naked with Nan Punt and Sally Sebum at the Pig & Pox Tavern in Maiden Lane. 

You can find more excerpts from Chapter 1 at TC Boyle's website.


By the way, the Encyclopedia's summary on the Niger:

Niger River, principal river of western Africa. With a length of 2,600 miles (4,200 km), it is the third longest river in Africa, after the Nile and the Congo.

To put this into perspective,  competing claims say the Mississippi River is between 2,300 and 2550 miles long.

Yellow Legs Strolling The Boardwalk

Before we left Anchorage late Sunday, we made a stop at Potter Marsh.  Here's a little fun with the (I can't keep calling it 'the new') Canon Rebel and some photoshop.  I'll save the terns for another post. 

I am still learning how to get the automatic focus to work with birds flying against a background and the camera doesn't know what to focus on.  Walking on the boardwalk was relative easy.  Flying is another story.  (Think luck.) There are lots of deleted photos.

 

Chick with adult. Really I have no idea which adult.  They were doing the things birds do when they want to decoy someone from a nest.  Flying ostentatiously near you and making lots of noise.

Here's the same picture, refocused on the adult.  (I didn't intend to only get one bird in focus.  I still have to learn to better control the depth of field on this camera too.  It wasn't this hard with my old Pentax.  But then I couldn't play with the pictures like this and see them instantly either.)

Or like this in Photoshop.  

Meanwhile the stork finally landed in San Francisco this afternoon and we're going up tomorrow afternoon to check out the bundle. 

Help Set The Future of 36th and New Seward Tonight

There's an open house on Monday, June 16, 2014, 4:30 – 7:30 PM with a presentation at 5:30 PM. Click here for more details!

I tried to get info on Friday at the DOT office near my house, but the project engineer there, Chong Kim, didn't know the details of the 36th/Seward project.  He did tell me about the vandalism on the bike trail under Seward Highway.

The maps are clear enough for me to figure out completely.   For instance, can westbound cars on 36th turn north in these plans?

There down to three options.  The links take you to bigger pdf maps.

 The one above is called the Half SPUI - Single Point Urban Interchange.  It looks like something happens sound of 36, but the north half, not so much.  Can you turn north from 36th?  You have to be able to, but how?  Not clear on these maps.

 This is the hybrid single point urban interchange.  (These are their terms, not mine.)This one has off-ramps in the middle, rather than the sides.  That will be pretty confusing for drivers at first.  I think this is their preferred model.

 And this is the Loop Ramp.  When I first saw this I thought it wiped out the BP Energy Center, which would never happen.  But looking more carefully, it doesn't, but the move the parking lot - taking out, it would seem,  some of the birch forest that makes this building so amazing.  And this looks a lot more expensive.  I don't think it's going to happen.

We just arrived at my mom's place in LA, so we'll miss this meeting.  So others have to go and report on this.  How will bikes and pedestrians fare in each option?  Is there a chance of leaving it as is?  I don't like the current intersection, but I want to be sure these are better before picking one. 

Some Not So Random Shots At Pride Fest

We didn't get there until after 3pm.  It was a gray day with some light drizzle, but that had ended by the time we got there.




We found ourselves standing next to the No on Prop 1 booth which was right next to the BP Booth.  That got me thinking about who else had booths.  Here are a few.







The Yes on 1 folks had a booth too, but by the time I got around to getting their picture it was almost 5pm and a lot of booths were already being dismantled.






US House candidate Forrest Dunbar was talking with the operations manager for the Alaska Workers Association, Barbara Sarantitis at the AWA booth.

AWA works with low-paid workers and their newsletter says

"AWA members cooperate year-round in organizing a self-help free-of charge Benefit Program that includes emergency food, cloting, preventive medical care, legal advice, non-emergency dental care . . ."

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America was there letting people know that LGBT folks were welcome at their church.  I didn't see Jim Minnery and his Love Your Gay Neighbor campaign.

Darrel Hess was staffing the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission and Ombudsman table.

The Anchorage International Film Festival had a booth to promoting the GayLa part of the festival.  Three AIFF heavy weights were at the booth when I got there:  Laura Moscatello, the general manager,  and board members Rich Curtner, and Dean Franklin,  who is also their web manager. 

The National Park Service was there as well. 

Bike Trail Slasher

Just last fall I wrote about the opening of the Campbell Creek bike trail under the Seward Highway.

Today, when I went to see Chong Kim, the Department of Transportation Project Engineer who was in charge of that project so I could ask questions about the three final options for 36th and Seward Highway, he was very upset because someone, over the winter, slashed the screens that are used to protect bikers and pedestrians from debris falling off the highway.  Other places these are also to keep snow plowed on the road above from hitting people on the trail.  Here, along Campbell Creek, they aren't allowed to plow snow into the creek, but I'm sure it happens once in a while.  Chong had worked hard to get screens that were both functional and decorative.   He's clearly upset about this.





Here are some pictures of what's happened.

It was a little hard taking pictures because the screens are see-through to a certain extent.  But on the near left side you can see a big rectangle cut out. 

This project goes under four different roads - two frontage roads and then the north and south parts of the highway.  So there are a bunch of screens and parts of most of them have been damaged.

Here's Chong Kim, the project manager on video.  I've talked to him about a number of projects over the last few years and he's always been very candid and passionate about the projects.  The kind of public administrator who gives this member of the public confidence.

These aren't cheap screens.  He said the fabric for all these screens cost $10,000.  The material, with the images of a skier, runner, and biker were specially ordered.

Chong was truly upset and trying to figure out how to fix these in a way that will still be attractive, but harder to destroy.

Another.



















Here they just slashed it.

And here they made a long narrow peek hole.

There's more, but I figure that's enough to get the idea across.




Of course, I wish I could talk with the person(s) who did this.  What was he thinking?  (Research seems to indicate it's almost always a male.)  I looked for interviews with vandals on google, but that got me to a talk with a rock group. 

A brief google search for research sort of confirmed this, but the research was old. It suggested that the need for

• love and security
• new experiences
• praise and recognition
• responsibility

were the basic causes for vandalism and violence.  From The Roots Of Vandalism and Violence:

Anger, hate and lack of concern for others are common reactions to being unloved and rejected.  Vandalism and violence are an expression of these feelings. 

I tend to believe this is the case, but while it said the findings were based on research, it didn't show the sources.

It's not a simple problem.  It's about getting parents training on how to raise their kids.  It's about schools making sure all kids' strengths can find expression and be rewarded.  It's about funding good pre-school programs and good day care.

It's about governments that put money into the education of young kids.  Our current legislature isn't going to decrease vandalism.  

Shredding Alaska Archives

There's something wrong about a company that shreds documents being called "Alaska Archives."

And since we only just learned recently that the Federal Archives' Alaska holding will be shipped from Alaska to Seattle,  it was particularly startling to see this truck next to me at a stop light.  I took a very fast picture before the light changed. 

[UPDATE June 16, 2014:  Pico Alaska links to a 49 Writers story on the impact of the archives moving to Seattle.

In fact, 49 Writers has a whole series on the Archives and how to use them.  I guess now it will start with a ticket to Seattle.]

China White Paper Changes Rules Of Hong Kong Basic Law

Police crackdowns on protesters make good television.  And even without video or photographs, the stories have concrete images that readers and listeners can quickly comprehend.

But technical wording changes in long 'white papers' are much harder for the news media to present.  Especially when the history behind the documents is unknown.

China has recently made  significant changes in the rules that govern Hong Kong - The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR.)  Rules that foreshadow crackdowns on the freedoms that Hong Kong residents enjoy that aren't shared in the rest of China.

In this post I'm going to

• give a very brief history of the Basic Law and the context of Hong Kong at the time based on my experiences living in Hong Kong when it was promulgated.
• offer an excerpt from the new white paper that gives a sense of the kind of language that is making the people of Hong Kong fearful.

Hong Kong 1989/90

On April 4, 1990, toward the end of our Fulbright year at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,  the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) was passed by the Third Session of the Seventh National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing.

There were still seven years to go before the UK would hand over Hong Kong to the Chinese.  It was less than year since Tiananmen and people in Hong Kong were worried that all the freedoms they had under the British would be swept away. (I'd note that compared to the US, their freedoms were modest already.)  People were seeking escape routes in case things got bad.  News stands were full of new magazines that highlighted countries where Hong Kong residents could apply for citizenship.  I remember big ads in the newspaper for citizenship in Botswana for people who could invest, if I recall right, US$250,000.  Vancouver was becoming known as Hongcouver because so many people were buying property and establishing residency there.

Although Hong Kong was a British colony and people had British passports, people had discovered that when they renewed their passports, the words 'right to abode' were no longer in them.  Britain was not prepared to have 5 million Hong Kong residents move to London.

The Basic Law offered Hong Kong special rights and freedoms that were not available to mainland Chinese.  At the time, Hong Kong was a wide open capitalist* city full of consumer goods and high rise buildings - all the glitter and free trade of the west.  In mainland China things were still grey from people's clothes to the most rudimentary shops with few goods for sale.  You'd tell the clerk what you wanted.  She'd write out a receipt which you took to the cashier.  When you paid, you were given a receipt to take back to the clerk who would give you your item.  Every hotel floor - and even the 'foreign expert housing' I stayed in on campus in when visiting Beijing - had young giggling girls who monitored guests as they came and went from their rooms.

China had to make some guarantees to the British that Hong Kong wasnt going to revert to the severe Mainland communist control and that the people of Hong Kong weren't going to lose all the freedom they had.  And Beijing, it seemed, didn't want to kill the golden goose that was bringing in so much foreign currency, much of it sending Chinese products to the rest of the world.   This was before Deng Xiaoping made his southern tour and declared there was a place for capitalism within China.  It was before Shanghai's transformation.

The answer was the document known as the Basic Law.   A key phrase in the Basic Law was "One country, two systems."  As Hong Kong reverted back to China after its 99 year lease to Great Britain, it would be allowed to maintain its own system.  The border from Mainland China into Hong Kong was heavily controlled.  That was the deal.  This last week, following the tens of thousands in Hong Kong who publicly commemorated Tiananmen's 25th anniversary, China released a white paper that appears to change the rules originally set out in the Basic Law.

One part of the Basic Law says that eventually the people of Hong Kong should be able to vote for the chief executive.  In 2007 the date for such elections was set as 2017.  It appears that many people in Hong Kong believe if such an election does take place, Beijing will limit candidates those who 'love China."

I haven't had a chance to read it all carefully.  But here's an excerpt that I found that seems to highlight the kinds of changes that are causing severe heartburn for people in Hong Kong right now.

"One country, two systems" is a holistic concept. The "one country" means that within the PRC, HKSAR is an inseparable part and a local administrative region directly under China's Central People's Government. As a unitary state, China's central government has comprehensive jurisdiction over all local administrative regions, including the HKSAR. The high degree of autonomy of HKSAR is not an inherent power, but one that comes solely from the authorization by the central leadership. The high degree of autonomy of the HKSAR is not full autonomy, nor a decentralized power. It is the power to run local affairs as authorized by the central leadership. The high degree of autonomy of HKSAR is subject to the level of the central leadership's authorization. There is no such thing called "residual power." With China's Constitution stipulating in clear-cut terms that the country follows a fundamental system of socialism, the basic system, core leadership and guiding thought of the "one country" have been explicitly provided for. The most important thing to do in upholding the "one country" principle is to maintain China's sovereignty, security and development interests, and respect the country's fundamental system and other systems and principles.

The whole text can be read at the South China Morning Post here.


Given that Hong Kong was a British colony, one might expect Great Britain to be concerned about changes in the agreement they signed when they handed over Hong Kong to China.  But I can't find any official reaction out of London.  That may not happen as China's premiere Li Keqiang is headed to London for significant trade talks next week.

Should anyone be surprised about this?  I think not.  I would guess that the Basic Law gave the British a way to say, as they left, that we've made sure you'll be ok, though they had nothing to do with writing it.  It was the Joint Declaration that they worked out with China as conditions for the handover.   The Basic Law always had enough ambiguity   that China would be able to have as much control as they needed.  I think while people knew this, they still held out hope that they'd keep their freedoms.


*The capitalist label is a little misleading.  Most Hong Kong workers lived in low rent government housing blocks and different business sectors had guaranteed seats in the Hong Kong government.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/11/world/asia/hong-kong-beijing-two-systems-paper/index.html 

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/729661-china-releases-white-paper-strengthening-authority-over-hong-kong/

 http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/protests-in-hk-after/1145922.htmlhttp://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/protests-in-hk-after/1145922.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/hongkong/10889465/Hong-Kong-must-accept-Beijings-control-Chinas-Communist-Party-warns.html

[I've tried reposting this because Feedburner is having trouble updating links on blogrolls.  There was a lot of extra coding in the HTML that apparently came in with the quotation.  I've eliminated it, but hope I didn't cut out any of the post at the same time. And I'm not sure this will fix the pinging problem. But I posted the bear warning and it had no problem. That's why I think it's something in the coding of this post. ]  [It worked.] 

Why l Live Here - Bears On Campus

I got this email that was sent out to the University of Alaska Anchorage community today.

Dear Anchorage Campus Community:

Yesterday afternoon we reported the presence of a black bear with two cubs near the Integrated Science Building. Today, June 12, the bear and her cubs are still on and around the UAA campus. Just a short time ago, they were spotted on the trail that runs beside Mosquito Lake between UAA and APU. Please continue to be aware of your surroundings as you walk around campus. If you see the bear and/or her cubs, please do not approach them.

UAA is opening and operating a normal schedule today, June 12.

Thank you.

  My wife was out for her walk and often walks where the bears were spotted in yesterday's email.  I called her and she had just walked the trail but saw no bears.  She decided to take a different route home.

Moose?  Yes, they're pretty common on campus.  Bears?  That's much rarer.