UA Presidential Search Update - The Only Candidate, Jim Johnsen, Might Visit UAA July 8 [UPDATED]

I've been working on a post comparing the UA presidential searches of 1990, 1998, 2010, and 2015.  My goal, following UA Presidential Search 1: The Cultural Conflict, is to show how the searches have gone from traditional, open academic style searches to ever more closed, Board controlled searches.

Gathering data for this has taken a while and now I realize I have way more than most of my readers want to know.  So now I'm editing it.  I also have material for four or five more posts on the search and the candidate.  We'll see how many I get done. 

In the meantime, I wanted to let people know that in an email communication from Jim Johnsen, I did learn that the campus visits are supposed to be the week of July 6, with the Anchorage visit scheduled for July 8.  I'm posting that here because I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else and a few people have asked me.  The Board of Regents' Search Committee page's last announcement was June 4 - when they announced that there would only be one candidate visiting the campuses.

I put might in the title, because I'm wondering if the original schedule is still good.  

I'm not sure why they are waiting to announce the dates, but I think people should get as much advance warning as possible so they can arrange to see the candidate.

[UPDATE June 30, 2015:  As KS comments below, the schedule of visits is now up.  Here's a link to the whole schedule, and below is the Anchorage schedule.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - University of Alaska Anchorage
Meetings in UAA Consortium Library Room 307
8a-8:45a                      Meet with Governance Groups
9a-9:45a                      Meet with Faculty and Staff
10a-10:45a                  Meet with Students
11a-11:45a                  Meet with Alumni
12n-1:45p                    Lunch Break
2p-2:45p                      Meet with Deans and Directors
3p-3:45p                      Meet with Chancellor and Chancellor’s Cabinet
4:30p-6:30p                 Anchorage Community Forum at the Varsity Sports Grill in the Alaska Airlines Center]

Anchro-Pop Closes Out Diversity Celebration In Anchorage Today

Henna painting at the Somali table.

















The Hmong table had embroidered history lessons, as well as a book on the role of Laos and the Hmong in the Vietnam War. 








The Norwegian table.

The politicians who worked with the community to set the festival up.  Elvi Gray-Jackson (black dress), Assembly member Anchorage, Geran Tarr, state representative from this district, and Ethan Berkowitz, mayor elect.  The pastor was presiding over a vigil in memory of the Charleston church shooting victims.  The recent Supreme Court decisions had also been lauded.

Yu'pik (I think) dancers. 






















And this young man got his face painted with what looks like an old Yu'pik mask design. 












And the title of this post?  Well, it's what I thought of as I listened to Gambian born Anchorage singer, Ousman Jarju (OJ), and the Rebel Clef.   It's Afro-pop with an Anchorage flavor. He transformed a mall parking lot on a gray day into the place to be.



The Rebel Clef  FB page lists the band members.

"Johnnie wright III-Keyboardist /Music director Elivis Crenshaw- Base player Kiah Ward- Drums Ousman Jarju- lead singer Benjamin Blunt- Percussionist Freddie Stokes- saxophone player Angel Wright- Manager ."

 I've posted before about Anchorage having the most diverse census tracts and high school in the nation.  Chad Farrel, the sociologist who's written about this, explains this part of Anchorage, unlike more racially segregated cities, Anchorage has districts with whites as well as a full flavor of ethnic origins.  A follow-up post covers Professor Farrel's presentation at the Alaska Press Club 2014.  I've only highlighted a few that were out this afternoon.  

So, it seems to me, this music is something we can start calling Anchro-pop.  Enjoy the video - I decided to leave the footage as I got it, giving you a sense of being there, and getting it up today. 

No Limits On Human Imagination

Look at how these amazing Filipino artists - El Gamma Penumbra - use their bodies to convey beauty and an important message.  They've taken a traditional form or artistry in SE Asian cultures from Indonesia to Thailand - shadow puppets - and turned it into something entirely new.  Plus they had to work incredibly hard to make their artistry so precise. 




Here's part of Wikipedia's entry on El Gamma Penumbra:

Early career

El Gamma Penumbra was first founded in 2003 as a hip-hop boy group, competing in dance contests in their hometown. Before joining Pilipinas Got Talent, however, they changed their act thinking that there will be lesser chance of winning due to too many hip-hop dancers in the Philippines. Upon deciding to do shadow play, believing it is new and unique, they started practicing in a basketball court near their hometown using a tarpaulin and a halogen light as an improvisation.^[3]
They decided to produce an all-male group members, meaning females are not included, due to the "extreme body movements and contact required of their routines."^[4]

Thanks for the tip B.

Optimism

I forgot about this picture I took while biking in LA ten days ago.  I just feel like people who build like this near cliffs like these are real optimists.  I'm sure the engineers are sure everything's fine, and the building will probably be there a long time. 

The Million Candidate March On Washington DC

You think there are 14 Republican candidates running for US President in 2016?  Think again.  The Federal Elections Commission as of today (June 25, 2015) lists 112 Republican candidates.  The largest group of candidates - 123 - are listed as Independent.  Here's the list by number of candidates for each party as of June 25, 2015 from the Federal Election Website.

Number of Candidates	Party
123	Independent
112	Republican Party
86	Democratic Party
39	Other
26 (each)	None;   Unknown
13	No Party Affiliation
12	Unaffiliated Party
11 (each)	Libertarian; Write-In
4 (each)	Green Party; Constitutional
3 (each)	United Party;  American Party
2 (each)	NBC;  Independent American Party;  Federalist Party
1 (each)	Reform Party;  HEL;  Democratic Farm Party;  Communist;  American Independent Party;  AME;  A99
421 total	Numbers as of June 25, 2015 at FEC Website.  (Plus I admit to possible errors)

I propose we aim for a one million candidate march on Washington DC.  The date I've chosen is Friday the 13th (there's just one in 2016 - in May), because 999,999 of these candidates will be unlucky and not win.  (Some actually may think those who don't win are the lucky ones.)

So that leaves less than a year to round up 999,579 more candidates.

So, how can you become a candidate so you can march next May 13?  From the FEC website:

"Under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended (the Act), an individual becomes a candidate for federal office when:

• The individual has received contributions aggregating in excess of $5,000 or made expenditures aggregating in excess of $5,000; or
  
• The individual has given consent to another person to receive contributions or make expenditures on behalf of him or herself and that person has received contributions aggregating in excess of $5,000 or made expenditures aggregating in excess of $5,000 (11 CFR 100.3(a))."

That's the easy part.  

Slate explained the process and paperwork for running for President in 2008.

All the details - it's pretty complicated - are on another FEC webpage - Quick Answers To Candidate Questions. 

There were a few party names that caught my eye.

HEL - Votesmart writes:

"William Knox Richardson 

Announced, Helluva Party for President

Contact Information

Campaign
5805 West Harmon Avenue #308
Las Vegas, NV 89103"

A99 - Jeremy Lee Milligan.

I haven't found anything that directly explains what the name of the A99 party (Party is not part of the name) is about.  But I did find a reference to A99:15 of the Nixon Tapes where Nixon is talking to Governor Shafer about a commission that was looking at the legalization of marijuana:

A99:15

Shafer: The congressional members didn’t participate as much until the very end, and then Javits and Hughes tried to take over. [Chuckling] We would have had legalization if we hadn’t really, you know, they wanted to have the alcohol model, which is wrong. We were against legalization, because we feel that in the first place the returns are not in about the pharmacological effects of the drug.

President Nixon: I would say this with regard to that, you know how Ray is an old politician. You know very well that no matter how precisely you state it, how your report reads, that they will try to oversimplify it and say, ‘The commission recommends legalization,’ or, ‘It does not recommend legalization.’ [Unclear] And I think it is important that you say, ‘Let us understand whatthis report does do and what it does not do. We do not believe marijuana should be legalized.’ I think you

should say that.’

Shafer: We’ve already said it [unclear].

President Nixon:And then you go on to say, ‘However, we believe that in terms of penalties that there should be some, uh, that in order to get at the problem there should be’ this and that and the other thing

You can read more aboutf Nixon and marijuana at CSDP.

LA - Anchorage 3: Coming Home Around Midnight

About 15 minutes out of Anchorage, we're flying over the water, mountains, and glaciers of Prince William Sound.  It's almost midnight, the sun's been down about 20 minutes. 

Now we're over Cook Inlet.  Two different waters side by side.

The summer green on the mudflats at the edge of the runway.

This series of pictures is of the waters flowing at the end of Turnagain Arm.  You can see the much smaller line of  the Seward Highway as it makes its long slow turn around the end of the Arm.  It starts on the right just below the middle and goes across to the left and then curves back to the right.  It's clearer in some of the images than others.

Each Photoshop tool allows you to see something different in the image.  The letters didn't come out so well, but for those with an interest, these are the tools I used:
A.   Posterize filter
B.   Image adjustments - invert
C.   Image adjustments - equalize  - very close to the original
D.   Fresco filter
E.   Image - curves


I am working on other posts, just haven't gotten all the information quite right yet.  

LA - Anchorage 2: Clouds From Above

We left LA at 8pm.  The sun had set.  We were headed north and I was sitting on the west facing side of the plane.  It was cloudy much of the way.  Here are some clouds.

LA - Anchorage 1: Leaving LA

We left the gate at 7:50pm..  Just past the beaches, patterns in water.  Tip of Palos Verdes on the left.

Catalina. 

Cloud island in the sky.

Channel Islands

Sitemeter Out Of Control - UPDATED Again: July 9

[UDATE July 27, 2015:  I've switched to StatCounter,  Hello StatCounter, Goodbye Sitemeter explains why, and has links that show how to do it.]

[UPDATE July 9, 2015:  Sitemeter has been working again for the last two days for me.  It is still going to Vindicosuite and I will be looking at Statcounter as people have recommended when I have a little more time.]

[UPDATE June 30, 2015 10:45pm Alaska Daylight Time:  An hour ago I checked Sitemeter and it was still saying to try back in a few minutes.  But now there is something back up, but it's still whacked.  There are days with way more hits than I ever get and there are days with zero hits.  But it's a sign someone is working on it.

OK, back to the original post.]



I signed up for Sitemeter probably back in 2007.  At that time it was a one man operation and if I had a question I could email him and get a quick personal response signed by David Smith.  It gave me formats for seeing who was visiting my blog that were different from others - more precise and meaningful.  It also revealed to me how much data websites get from visitors - ip address, location, kind of computer in detail, search terms, browser, and much more.  Not everything from every visitor, but more than most realize.

I've voiced praise and frustration with Sitemeter in the past.

Then at some point Sitemeter apparently was bought by MySpace.  Since then things have gone downhill.  Reports about MySpace selling information about  Sitemeter users would come up.  Sitemeter stopped answering any of my help requests or comments.

Recently, something called vindicosuite started showing up and gumming things up.  From a google forum:

Mark Liberman said:

I posted about this on Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16345).

x.vindcosuite.com seems to be "passive DNS replicator", which may be performing a genuine function; but apparently buggy software at sitemeter results in pages with sitemeter counting code on them getting redirected there.

I've been seeing intermittent flashes of this sort of thing from sitemeter for over a year, and during that same period of time, the company has failed to respond to repeated questions directed at their "support" team.

As of yesterday evening, the problem was categorical rather than intermittent, so I removed the sitemeter code from the WordPress theme, and the problem went away.

As far as I can tell, this is a symptom of incompetence rather than malice, but in any case, sitemeter is clearly more trouble than it's worth.

Then Sitemeter was down for nearly day and when it returned, it was totally whacked.  It would show the same hit 30 or 40 times in my stats.   My stats are totally crazy.  I'd note that the number of hits Sitemeter tells me I get (generally in the 200 range each day) is wildly different from Google's count of over 1000.  But the Sitemeter info on individual hits tells me more about who visits what pages.  (No, there are no specific names connected to the visitors, but for some repeat visitors I can tell.)

I'd totally get rid of it, but that just adds one more thing to my todo list - finding another good stat counter.  And my todo list is already way too long.  

Is Terrorism A Hate Crime?

The shooting in Charleston, South Carolina is one of many instances in the news this year already where people's stereotypes about race has led to black Americans dying.  Rather than write yet another post on this topic, here are a selected few that look at the topic of racism from different perspectives.  The first one has gotten a lot of hits from google the last couple of days. 


Is Terrorism A Hate Crime?  -  This post examines the contradiction of those politicians and citizens who oppose the idea of 'hate crime'  when it adds to the severity of the penalty, yet strongly support the idea of 'terrorism' charges increasing the penalty.  This is a detailed look at the meaning of both terms and I quote the tortured logic of some of the folks who support or oppose them



Why Is It Hard To Talk About Racism? - This post outlines an approach I've used in workshops on racism to approach the topic in a way that is a little easier to get people talking.  Even so, some people will say it's not hard to talk about it and they have nothing more to say.



Michele Norris Talks About Race At UAA  - This post reports on NPR's Michele Norris' talk at UAA about her Race Card Project, getting people to write and post short cards online about what race means to them.  There's also a bit of video of Norris that evening in January 2014. 

"Like termites, they undermine the structure of any neighborhood in which they creep."  - This post reviews the book Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby, who went to Central High in Birmingham, after 'integration.'   His experience there causes him to first review how desegregation resulted in widespread loss of teaching jobs for black teachers and a resegregation in the schools.

He then goes on to look at how neighborhoods were segregated using federal home loan laws and restrictive covenants.  Here's a short quote from the post (and the book) about a real estate developer who destroyed neighborhoods by scaring white folks out of their city neighborhoods and into buying his suburban white by covenant housing developments. 

"But Nichols's most important contribution to the way we live wasn't something he invented himself.  He just perfected it.  And the thing he perfected was the all-white neighborhood, hardwired with restrictive covenants that dictated not only the size and shape of the house but the color of the people who could live inside.  This idea, the racialization of space, would take root deep in the nation's consciousness, for both whites and blacks alike, becoming so entrenched that all the moral might of the civil right crusade was powerless to dislodge it.  In the South, Jim Crow was just the law.  In Kansas City, J.C. Nichols turned it into a product.  Then he packaged it, commodified it, and sold it.  Whiteness was no longer just an inflated social status.  Now it was worth cash money." [p.82]

And to connect back to the title of this post, here's another quote from the post.

Colby then discusses Nichols' friends, a group of prominent developers from around the country who were the 'brain trust' of National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). 

"Not by coincidence in 1924 NAREB made racial discrimination official policy, updating its code of ethics to say, 'A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality . . . whose presence will clearly be detrimental to the property values of that neighborhood.  Like termites, they undermine the structure of any neighborhood in which they creep."

[Reposted because of Feedburner problems.]