How Not To Improve The University

The title of Dermot Cole's article in the ADN today set me off already:  University needs to stop running campuses like independent fiefdoms.    It's fine til we get to the word 'fiefdom.'  That word is loaded.  I imagine faculty at all campuses are much more united on the idea of that word applying to the university's statewide administration.  But that has me falling into the same trap.  Fighting words make people defensive and they swing back.

OK, headlines are usually written by editors, not by the columnists, so let's not hold Cole responsible there.  And I'd note, that more often than not, I tend to agree with Cole and like how he writes.  And I'd further note that Cole's brother is a faculty member at UAF, so he has a little more access to what's happening at the university than most reporters.

Fairbanks versus Anchorage Rivalry

But the Fairbanks/Anchorage rivalry is long and deep.  Fairbanks was the original campus.  Anchorage came later.  But as time progressed, the city, then municipality, of Anchorage grew to surpass Fairbanks in population and as the center of business and government in the state.  Anchorage has a population of 300,000 while Fairbanks (the North Star Borough)  is one third of that  at about 100,000.  (Juneau's population is around 31,000.)

Yet despite Anchorage's student body long ago growing larger than Fairbanks', Fairbanks has continued to get a higher budget allocations than Anchorage.   For example:

From UA Budget Proposal for 2016 p. 52

UAF had $40 million more than UAA, though the Fairbanks community is have the size of Anchorage (not counting Matsu even).  And that doesn't include the extra $30 million for Statewide that is also housed in Fairbanks.  I understand that the University is everything to Fairbanks and that all the legislators coalesce around it at budget time.  And the natural gravity of the state favors Anchorage and that appears to make Fairbanks more protective of what it has.  Fairbanks fought really hard to prevent UAA from having doctoral programs, for example.  Fairbanks has seen its strength, and rightfully so, in research.  They still get maybe six times the external research funding that UAA gets.  Though Anchorage faculty would note that they have heavier teaching loads and many came to UAA because they wanted to teach.  Blocking UAA from getting doctoral programs, was seen in Anchorage, as a way to preserve that research advantage since doctoral students are helpful when you're trying to get grants to do research. 

So there is a lot of tension between UAA and UAF.  From the Anchorage perspective, it seems like UAA is fighting for what its size and location rightly deserve and that UAF is fighting to preserve what it has against natural forces for more to flow to Anchorage.  Fairbanks sees itself as 'the flagship campus'  as the serious research campus.    This is the background to anything about the University of Alaska system.  Much of the discussion here makes no sense without knowing it.   

Cole's Article
 
But let's get to Cole's basic argument in the article:  that the University of Alaska should just be, in essence, one institution with, satellite campuses that are run centrally, from Fairbanks, I guess.  And specifically all the campuses should have the same calendar each semester.

Centralization versus Decentralization
A basic truism in organizations is the ever present tension between centralization and decentralization.  Centralization helps make things consistent over a whole system which has advantages.  Up to a point, quantities of scale and lack of duplication make a centralized system more efficient.   But decentralization allows for much more flexibility and the capacity to meet local needs.  Change is much slower with centralization because everything has to be approved from the top.   All organizations go through a continual struggle to balance the forces for centralization against the forces for decentralization.

 Do we need a single UA main campus?
The specific failing of the university system that Cole was upset about was the lack of a single calendar for all the campuses.   I'm not convinced this is a critical problem.  I do know that attempts to make all courses across the state with the same name equal is a big deal.  Just in Anchorage, as part of the UAA system, I know lower level course taught at Eagle River with the same name as those taught on campus, weren't the same course, because say, the UAA econ department,  didn't have control over who taught the courses in Eagle River.  So when students moved to the higher level courses, they didn't have the same preparation as those taught on campus.  And Cole acknowledged this as a harder nut to crack.

Do we all need the same calendar?
But I'm not convinced everyone having the same calendar is a critical academic problem.  I do know that not being able to get the classes they need to graduate in four or five years can be a problem for students.  Some of this is a program issue.  When I counseled students, we set up a schedule for all their classes over the two to four years (this was a graduate program with mostly part time students), I made sure they knew which classes were offered which semester and the consequences of not taking them in a particular sequence.  Programs need to articulate that better and make sure students understand that from the beginning.

For students taking distance classes at another campus?  Why does the calendar have to be the same?  A later start and finish in one campus may give a student more time to get the work done.  In some ideal world, this would be nice, but the benefits of everything being the same don't seem to me to outweigh the loss of flexibility and responsiveness to local needs.  For people who have a strong need for order, I get it.  But we're in the business of education, not in the business of making everything orderly.  I think there is some sort of vision that students should be able to switch from one campus to the other as if they were all the same.  Given the distance between campuses, this is not something that will happen with in class classes.  With distance classes it's doable, but it doesn't require the calendars to be identical.  There are other kinds of coordination that seem more practical.  For instance UAA and the Anchorage School District have coordinated their spring breaks which means Anchorage families with kids in K-12 and UAA are off at the same time.  Would we want to tell every school district in Alaska they have to coordinate with the University schedule?   And there are a number of shorter courses or intensive courses that start or finish at different times. 

The sentence that got me to write this post was

"Experience elsewhere demonstrates that statewide programs can be run out of a single campus and exist in multiple places.  Private businesses and state agencies do this."  

I'll skip the issue of how businesses run or even state agencies compared to universities.  They aren't the same animal and I've written about this before. 

Where are state college calendars coordinated?

Let's focus on 'experience elsewhere.'  Which statewide university systems is Cole talking about?  I started checking to see which western states have a single calendar across all their state campuses.

University of California and the California State University are totally different systems.  But even in the University of California system, not only do UCB (Berkeley) and UCLA (Los Angeles) have different schedules, but UCB is on the semester system and UCLA is on the quarter system. 

OK, Cole will say, rightfully, that California is so much bigger it shouldn't be the comparison.  So I looked at other states in the West.

Wyoming just has one main campus.

Nevada Reno and Las Vegas each have different calendars.

The University of Arizona has a different calendar from Northern Arizona University and both are different from Arizona State.

Washington State is on semesters and so its calendar is very different from the University of Washington's which is on quarters.  Evergreen is also on quarters, but has its own calendar.

Boise State, Idaho State, and the University of Idaho each has its own calendar.

Montana State University at Bozeman's  calendar is different from MSU at Billings'.  And the University of Montana (Helena) has its own calendar.

Utah State University campuses seem to have the same calendar, but they're different from the University of Utah and Southern Utah University.  They're all fairly close, but not exactly the same.

At the University of Colorado at Denver, I found different colleges (Dental, Pharmacy, and Nursing calendars all popped up first on google and were all different) within the Denver campus that had different calendars.  So it wasn't a surprise that the Boulder campus calendar was different.

The only western state where all the public universities had the same calendar was Oregon.
And they have a very small statewide coordinating organization that might actually be a good model for Alaska.

I get that for many the idea of tight coordination across campuses seems like a really good idea.  But why don't all the western state universities have it?   I suspect because the effort to coordinate isn't worth the benefits.  It seems to me to distract from more important issues - like the budget imbalances between UAA and UAF and the  statewide administration whose budget is the same as the Juneau campus!  If we want to look at Oregon - where all the campuses have the same calendar - let's look at their statewide administration.

So I looked for more information.  Here's what I found:

Screenshot from here

 So, there's no central administration any more - you should contact the individual campus 'fiefdoms.'


And what is HECC?

The HECC is a 14-member public commission, supported by the HECC agency. The agency includes the Offices of:  Executive Director, Policy & Communication; Student Access & Completion; Community Colleges & Workforce Development; Operations; Private Postsecondary Education; University Coordination; and Research & Data. For more information, see About Us.

But before we jump on the Oregon bandwagon, I'd note that the Oregon legislature pays a much smaller percentage of the total budget of their state universities than does Alaska and many states.


I'm not saying that coordinated calendars would be a bad thing.  I'm just surprised at the focus on something that seems to me to play a relatively insignificant role in our statewide system.  And it distracts from the really important issues.   If UAA is not rated as highly as other universities, as pointed out by former regent Kirk Wickersham last week, a large part of that is due to the fact that the university takes seriously its role to serve all of Alaska's potential students, including many who are not prepared for higher education.  This is not to blame the students, but to say that for many reasons our K-12 is unable to prepare all their students for college level education.  Perhaps we need a bridge institution between university and K-12.  (The regents got rid of the community college system as a budget saving move in 1987.)  Or we need a better way to provide K-12 education.  Or our whole society has to rethink the idea that everyone needs to go to college and figure out much better post K-12 vocational training for those who don't want college or don't have an aptitude for it, but feel that's what they have to do.  I wrote about these issues too in the link I gave above.

My experience at UAA was that there were a lot of first class faculty and many much smaller classes than you get at Outside state universities.  A student who picked her classes well could get an incredible education at UAA for a bargain price.  But the quality of her fellow students would not be what it would be at an Ivy League school or at the best public universities where admission standards are much more rigorous.  That UAA takes its job to serve all Alaskans seriously, is a good thing.  Though we aren't doing as good a job as we should be.

Compared to these issues, coordinating calendars is trivial.  A distraction. And, if the UA system did become "one central campus existing in multiple places" (unlike Oregon with the unified calendar) where would that one central campus be?  If you think agreeing to a unified calendar is hard, wait until we have the fight over the location of the central campus.  It's a solution, but not to the real problems we face.

AIFF2015: From The New Yorker Cartoons, Political Brainwashing, Afghanistan, Mt. Marathon Race, Transgender Dad

There are lots of documentaries at the Anchorage International Film Festival.  I'm still working on a post about the ones in competition.  But just because a film doesn't get into competition, doesn't mean it's not terrific.  Here's a quick look at a few of the docs to show you the breadth of topics covered this year.  Including two very dramatic parental transformations.  In both cases, the filmmakers' dads.  I haven't seen any of them so I can't tell you for sure if they are good.  But even if they aren't great cinema, the topic might be of interest.  And I'm betting they  are all good cinema.

The links will take you to more information about the films including when and where they'll play so you can put them on your calendar now.  The festival begins Friday Dec. 4, 2015.

Very Semi-Serious - New Yorker cartoons	Janey Makes a Play A 90 year old playwright writes and directs her play
No Greater Love An American military chaplain in Afghanistan.	3022 Feet Historic look at Seward's Mt Marathon race.
From This Day Forward  - The filmmaker examines her parents' marriage and how her transgender dad and straight identified mom kept it together	A Courtship  An evangelical Christian arranged marriage
*The Brainwashing of My Dad  Filmmaker examines the forces that helped her Democratic dad transform into "an angry right wing fanatic." "Brainwashing" unravels the plan to shift the country to the Right over thelast 30 years through media manipulation"	Harry and Snowman -  Post WW II Dutchman in US rescues Amish plow horse from glue factoryand soon they win the triple crown of show jumping.

*Note:  Brainwashing is a film in progress and the filmmaker is looking for audience reactions before final editing.

Is Droning A Word? Meeting The Future At McHugh Creek

It was sunny.  Almost no clouds.  Not really cold for a November day (high 30˚s F).  So what am I doing still at home?  Yes, getting chores done, but get out while it's sunny, boy.


So I drove down to McHugh Creek.  It was getting late - 3:45pm.  Sunset would be around 4:30pm.

The upper parking lot is gated off at this state park area these days as the legislature needs to cut services to residents so they can give billion dollar tax credits to the oil companies.

But I needed to move around.  The sky was glowing as the sun was slowly floating down toward the water.

That's when I saw something that didn't belong.

 It was coming down.

It's the white spot just below the center of the picture at the right.






And yet lower.

Again, it's the white spot below and to the left of the center.  Against a tree tilted to the right.   Clicking the images will enlarge them a bit.

And now it's almost on the ground.  But then it went back up and I saw the men controlling it near the creek.




It's in the upper left this time.  The control panel has a monitor so you can see the view from the drone when it's flying.  I understand the appeal and I get there are lots of good applications.  Imagine taking it when hiking in bear country.  Not only can you check to see if there are bears behind the bushes, but if you find one, you can send the drone to hover over it to distract it from you.   Do they come with bear spray units?  I think I'll let others try this out first.


I had come to see the water and move my legs.  I'm coming to believe that my Achilles tendon is actually healed and walking on the trail was wonderful.

Then on up the trail before it starts getting dark.  There was no snow at all at McHugh and the trail was dry and hard - perfect hiking conditions.  Since I'm testing my heal,  about a mile and a half roundtrip would be fine and get me back before dark.

I knew how to take pictures like this with my old film Pentax so that the sun wouldn't overexpose, but still have a lot to learn with the digital.

I stopped at Potter Marsh briefly on the way home.  It's mostly covered in ice now.

[Reposted because of Feedburner problems.]

AIFF 2015: Figuring Out The New Schedule Software SCHED

The Anchorage International Film Festival seems to have abandoned Festival Genius - a film festival specific software program - for a  more generic event scheduling program called SCHED.  I'm just starting to figure it out.   You can skip this post and check it out yourself here.  (I'd note that SCHED does list film festivals as one of the kinds of events it is 'perfect for.')

Some first impressions:

• It looks simpler
• It doesn't seem to have the many ways Festival Genius allowed people to search and sort for specific types of films, specific times, venues, or to create a variety of schedule formats.
• It's color coded films by genre.
• There are drop down windows that tell you more about each film including when and where it plays.
• There's information about who is attending.
• It's social media connected and interactive.
• It seems to have good mobile applications

On the actual website, you could click on any of the colored bars and get a drop down window with info about the film and when and where you can see it.  But there's a lot of different colors and when you scroll down, you lose the legend that tells you what the colors mean. 

Click to enlarge and focus

OK, I'd gotten to know my way around Festival Genius, and it took a bit of time, so I don't want to judge this yet.  I want to see how easy this will be for finding out when, say, all the docs play, or all the features in competition play.  I want to see how easy I can see how much time I have from the end of one film to the beginning of another and how easy it is to see all the films at one venue for the afternoon.  Once I got the hang of Festival Genius, it could do all this kind of fancy sorting.

The print version looks like it allows you to see all the important information (but not the details about the film itself) all on one page.   Actually, now that I look carefully at the print version - you can do lots of different sorting there.  GET TO THE PRINT VERSION from the regular schedule - upper right.  See pink circle in image below.  Once you're in the print version, the sort boxes are in the upper right side.

Click to enlarge and focus

And there is a page with guides to personalizing the schedule.

From what I could figure out so far, I can pick films I want to see and it will set up a schedule, but I can't see some of the timing and location overlaps and conflicts before I pick a film.  But maybe that's in there.  I know I had to create some of these things myself - like all the features in competition over the week - but FG made it fairly easy to get the information. 

I would note that I never registered for Festival Genius because it required more personal info about me than I wanted to give it.  That wasn't a factor with SCHED. 

The Privacy Policy doesn't have anything that raised any red flags for me - though these days it's hard to know the implications of the language.  But I did notice that because they don't collect information about people under 13 years of age, such people can't sign up.  (Well, of course they can, but SCHED seems to be giving itself an out if they do.):

"8. No Collection of Children's Personal Information.

Our Services are intended for general audiences and commercial use and are not intended for and may not be used by children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from children under the age of 13 and delete any information We believe to be in violation of this provision."

There was nothing to tell me that people under 13 cannot register I registered.

This clause from Your Data and Responsibilities gave me some pause.

"We need to be able to use your data to provide you with our Services and you are granting us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute Your Data in any existing or future media as we deem appropriate. You also grant to us the right to sub-license these rights."

I'm not sure what this all might mean for me.  I don't expect to be putting much information up there, but I'm guessing all the information that AIFF puts up now belongs to SCHED.  This was the kind of legal language the Anchorage Daily News (now the Alaska Dispatch) used that scared me off as a blogger when they were reaching out to local bloggers.  Why would I want to give them rights to use my materials like this?  It seemed like a one way benefit.

And I'm hoping that posting the screen shot above from SCHED won't get me in trouble - I couldn't tell from the legal language.  I'm assuming this is fair use since I'm sort of reviewing this software.

So, I like the colors, but I'm leery that getting the kinds of information that Festival Genius offered will be much harder.  I haven't talked to anyone at the Festival about the change yet.  I'm guessing this is a lot cheaper for them. 


Given the ability to sort in the print version, I think this is going to be just fine. 

4.5 Anchorage Earthquake: Two Quick Jolts Wake Me From Light Sleep

Screen shot from USGS

It wasn't strong, it wasn't long, but two quick jolts, maybe three or four seconds altogether.  Enough
to make slight creaking noises.

From the USGS:

M4.5 - 19km S of Y, Alaska

1. 2015-11-06 14:26:50 (UTC)

1. 2015-11-06 05:26:50 (UTC-09:00) in your timezone

1. Times in other timezones

Nearby Cities

1. 19km (12mi) S of Y, Alaska

1. 54km (34mi) NNW of Knik-Fairview, Alaska

1. 85km (53mi) N of Anchorage, Alaska

1. 334km (208mi) SSW of Badger, Alaska

1. 802km (498mi) WNW of Whitehorse, Canada

I'm not sure what Y stands for in their location description, but here's the map enlarged:

click to enlarge and focus better

"Smart and aggressive people have taken advantage of opportunities to teach, pursue scholarship, advance their causes, and persist in the face of a sometimes bewildering mixture of difficulty and opportunity.”

That's from the conclusion that Will Jacobs, Professor Emeritus in History, read from his book  Becoming UAA:  1954-2014 at Chancellor Tom Case's home Wednesday night.  Will, under some prodding from the UAA administration, has written what he more or less said was a first draft of UAA history and he discussed the book and its writing at a reception that included history faculty, some other emeritus faculty, and assorted other guests.

As I sat there listening to Will's talk, I marveled at how oblivious I had been to much of what was going on around me.  Sure, I knew about the merger and certainly about Fairbanks/Anchorage rivalries, but there were so many details I knew nothing about.  And he mentioned one player - Lew Haines - whom I did know somewhat, but had no idea really about his background and contributions to UAA.

It was yet one more reminder to me (and to readers) reach any conclusions about people until I have learned more about them - where they came from and what they all did before they entered the periphery of my life.   I'm looking forward to reading this book to just understand what was going on out of sight that impacted my work life. 

In the picture below you can see Chancellor Case on the right standing and Dr. Jacobs sitting at the far right.  For someone like me who has lived through much of this

This image gets bigger and sharper if you click on it

Will was bullish on what UAA has become, despite being

". . . troubled by conflicting values, uncooperative colleagues, and forced perceived to be malign emanating from Fairbanks"

lots of good things had been achieved.  The nature of public organizations is often troubled this way.  Budgets are often annual, making long term projects hard to achieve.  This rather than comprehensive planning, things get done piecemeal as political coalitions that can get funding for a project emerge for a time - ideally when the legislature has some slack in the budget.

But he also voiced concern for the future of state universities in fulfilling their traditional role as a path to upward social mobility. 

The 'ancient' history - back in the 50's and early 60's - before I was here, includes the creation of the community college by the Regents in Fairbanks  jointly with the Anchorage School Districts.  Will read some letters that sought (and got reassurance) that the new community college in Anchorage wasn't going to develop into a four year college.  From a letter from UA president Ernest Patty to the Board of Regents in 1954, recounting a conversation with Larry Good, the new Anchorage Community College director:

"I told him that we didn't want to create something that was going to develop, in two or three years, into a Junior College and then in two or three years after that become a competing section of the University.  He was quick to assure me that he was strictly a community college man, and that his ambitions did not extend beyond those limits for the Anchorage Community College . . . he would give us his word of honor that those were the plans on which he was proceeding. . ."

I became a faculty member in Anchorage in 1977, just as the old 'senior' college had become an independent four year college and from the very beginning I was told that Fairbanks was conspiring against Anchorage.  And at the reception Wednesday questions still came up about why Fairbanks today has a bigger budget than Anchorage while Anchorage has far more students.

And giving 'his word of honor.'  Wow, that seems so quaint today.  It would be nice if we could operate like that again.

The book is both legitimate historical academic research and, it seems, UAA public relations.  It's published by "University of Alaska Anchorage" and it says "Publication coordination by the UAA Office of Institutional Effectiveness."  There's a lot of history in here, but there's also a lot more that isn't in here.  It's a good start to documenting UAA's history and perhaps a call for others to jump in and fill in the gaps.

And talking about history, I would note that the Chancellor's house is a 10,000 square foot house in Turnagain that once belonged to Anchorage banker Elmer and Mary Louise Rasmuson.  After Mary Louise died in 2012 at age 101, the children arranged to donate the house to the University of Alaska Foundation to be used as the Chancellor's residence. 

John Weddleton Is Running For Assembly

I got an invitation to a campaign kickoff party for John Weddleton.  I'd first met John when he was hosting meetings in support of Title 21 - the planning section of the Anchorage Municipal Code.  I'd been invited, as a blogger, by people who supported the changes to Title 21 and were fighting last minute changes to revise the ordinance.  Mayor Sullivan had hired Dan Coffey in a no-bid contract to work (mostly) with developers who wanted changes to the plan which had gone through years of public meetings.

The meetings were at John's store - Bosco's.  I knew about Bosco's because my son had spent a fair amount of time and money their as a kid.  It's a comic book and gaming store and my son was serious about Dungeons and Dragons then.

I'd been impressed back then, with John's knowledge of Title 21 and his passion for public involvement and transparency.  I also learned that he'd gotten a lot of his knowledge from being a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission.  I also learned that the big motorcycle parked in front of the store was his too.

Last night John started off by talking about how when he first moved to Anchorage, he'd gone to a community council meeting and was impressed by how easy it was to get involved in his community.  There were assembly members at this meeting, he said, and you could talk to them like they were real people.  I remember, when I first came here as well, my own amazement at how accessible government and politicians are here in Anchorage.

He also pulled out some typical Anchorage public notice signs and pointed out that there was no information on the signs except a case number and a phone number.  If anyone wants to know what the project is, they have to call the number, and then they don't get told too much about the project.  And if you go to the Muni website, it's hard to find things.  He thought it should be easier for folks to know what the case was about. 

I decided that before posting this, I should check out the Muni website and see how easy or difficult it is to get case information.

I knew this was in the Community and Development Department, so I had a bit of a head start.  From there I found a link on the side to Boards and Commissions.  That got me to another page which had a list of meetings:

Platting Board - 11/4/2015	November 04, 2015 - 06:30 PM	Agenda
Planning and Zoning Commission - 11/9/2015	November 09, 2015 - 06:30 PM	Agenda
Assembly - Regular - 11/10/2015	November 10, 2015 - 05:00 PM	Agenda

 If you click on the Agenda link for Planning and Zoning Commission, you get an agenda.  I clicked on the very first item and got this:








Not very helpful. 

But other items on the agenda had links to pdf files of the cases.  So you can find a number of them, but it takes a certain amount of perseverance.  I'm sure there are simpler ways for people to find these things, but it also means that someone has to post and monitor the site to keep it current.  When I asked John about this afterward, he did say staff is posting some of this and it should get better.  But his point was that when people see the Public Notice signs, there's nothing to indicate what is being proposed and whether they should be interested or not, whether they should make the effort to find out. 


I'm always a bit uncomfortable about blogging local candidates.   It's important, but it seems I should try to cover all the candidates for an office.  That isn't easy when there are a number of races and lots of things vying for my attention.  Last year I got invitations from three of the mayoral candidates and went to all the functions and wrote about them.  The others I was able to catch at a candidate forum. 

In this south Anchorage assembly district I'm not even sure of how many candidates there are.

The ADN says: 

Joe Riggs, a conservative candidate who owns Alaska Healthcare Strategies, a medical equipment and consulting business, is also running.

The ADN more recently says that photographer David Jensen  joined the race.

After Cloudy, Snowy Days, Sun's Out

As I pulled into the Costco parking lot, the clouds parted, and the skinny trees' shadows blossomed on the wall.

And off beyond the parking lot, the mountains reappeared with fresh snow.

My Name Is Red

Chapter one starts with a murder.  In fact the title of the chapter - like all the chapters - is the name of the narrator: I AM A CORPSE.  The whole book revolves around finding out the narrator of the second chapter: I WILL BE CALLED A MURDERER.

That may be what holds the story together, but it's not really what the book is about.  So unimportant is the identity of the murderer that at our book club, two of the people said they couldn't remember who the murderer was.  MY NAME IS BLACK is probably the most frequent chapter title.  And BLACK is assigned the task of finding out who the murderer is.  They suspect one of three illustrators who were working secretly on a book for the sultan along with CORPSE.  So we hear from each of them as well as I WILL BE CALLED A MURDERER, assuming all along that one of them is the murderer. 

BLACK is assigned to interview the three artists and asks the master how will he be able to tell which is the murderer.  The master tells him to ask three questions, which will give you a glimpse of topics in the book, though at this point you don't have any idea where this will lead.

The three questions:

1.  "Has he come to believe, under the sway of recent custom as well as the influence of the Chinese and the European Franks, that he ought to have an individual painting technique, his own style?  As an illustrator does he want to have a manner, an aspect distinct from others, and does he attempt to prove this by signing his name somewhere in his work like the Frankish masters?  To determine precisely these things, I'd first ask him a question about 'style' and signature.'"

Then?

2.  Then, I'd want to learn how this illustrator felt about volumes changing hands, being unbound, and our pictures being used in other books and in other eras after the shahs and sultans who'd commissioned them have died.   .   .  Thus I'd ask a question about 'time' - an illustrator's time and Allah's time.

3.  The third would be 'blindness'!"  said the great master Head Illuminator Osman, who then fell silent as if this required no explication.
"What is it about 'blindness'?"  I said with embarrassment.
"Blindness is silence.  If you combine what I've just now said, the first and second questions, 'blindness' will emerge.  It's the farthest one can go in illustrating;  it is seeing what appears out of Allah's own blackness."

There's also a love story, though not a very satisfying one.   I, SHEKURE is the beautiful woman that a number of the characters are in love with.


My Name Is Red played games with my mind.  Ideas I'd never encountered exploded from the pages.  One of the masters went to Venice and saw many portraits in the "Frankish" style.  Portraits so realistic that if you saw the painting, you would be able to recognize the subject if you saw him on the street.  Well, of course, what's the big deal?  The big deal is that this was amazing to him.  That Allah's ban on idols, made such portraiture forbidden.  I had to go look at miniatures to see what the people looked like.  And yes, there are faces, but no, they really aren't that detailed.

There is also a group of religious fundamentalists who are being stirred up against the artists for trying to have a style.

And blindness?  Well, the work of a miniaturist is so exacting, that many go blind eventually.  Yet, some see this as the perfect situation for an artist because he is painting only what Allah sees at that point.  And they are such skilled artists that they can paint blind.

Lots to ponder here.  But also lots of detail and repetition, which is consistent with miniatures of that era and the return to themes illustrated over and over again.  

By the way, author Pamuk won a Nobel Prize in Literature. 

What's A Blogger To Do? Too Much To Write About - LIO Scandal, Forced Arbitration, Trump's Good Old Days, Hockey

Me:  Even with the gain of an hour overnight as we set our clocks back,  there's not enough time!
Jiminy Cricket:  Of course there is Steve, you just have to prioritize.
Me:  Actually, the number of things we could do has increased so fast that humans will soon be obsolete, we just can't keep up.  It used to be we maybe had two newspapers to read, now every newspaper in the world is available online.  Not to mention every home video anyone has ever made.
Jiminy Cricket:  You going to complain all morning or write?
Me:  OK, OK.  So, my first glimpse of November 2015 was an inspiring one as I looked out the window at what should have been 9:24am, but because of the time change was only 8:24am.  And if you look closely you can see the snow that we got Friday still lingering.


So, what's stacking up in the blog pile?  Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) posts on documentaries, shorts, animation, and maybe even Alaska films in competition.  I try to get some of those groups done before the festival begins and this year I have the features in competition up already.  I don't have to think too hard on these, just go looking for info on the films.  And the AIFF 2015 page is started already.  That's up on top and I'll be updating general festival strategy stuff from last year and information on the films for this year.

I've got more to do on the Chuitna decision which the resource development community is upset about and has appealed.  There are some significant democratic principle issues at stake there that should be explored.  But it's complicated and people have lots of other things to distract them (back up to complaints about too little time above.)

I want to post more on my new, evolving relationship with my sourdough starter.

I'm working on something on rules - what they do for us, but how to keep from becoming trapped by them.   There are some books I want to say something about, some movies, how Netflix and other online movie sites are changing things, more on the conflicts between police and African-Americans  . . .  But serious posts require some time and thought and if I take on a subject, I want to look at it differently than others, not just reprint what others write.

Then there are all the potential posts that show up everyday, not part of the queue, but begging to be written.  Today's Section A of the Alaska Dispatch News (ADN)  (it was the second time this week we had to call to say it wasn't delivered) was full of such stories.  I'll just try to do a short take on a couple of them.

1.  Jim Gottstein's lawsuit against the Legislative Information Office remodeling contract.  It's so easy for legislators to get away with stuff.  Lisa Demer wrote along detailed story on all the irregularities in the contract two years ago in the ADN.   But this needed someone with legal standing and money and perseverance to step up and sue.  Today's article reveals some private emails that show Rep. Hawker worked with the politically generous developer to get around legislative attorneys' opinions that a no-bid contract was illegal.  Legislators often work with constituents to find ways to get around obstacles to get things done.  But when it's for a no bid contract for a state building that's going to raise the legislature's  rent enormously, it's suspicious.  And Hawker's an accountant, so he can't plead ignorant (ignorance is not a get out jail free card for anyone, but he had special expertise and clearly should have known better.)

2.  Corporations slipping arbitration language into contracts.  This is a New York Times article that was on the front page of the ADN.  It's got several themes I've got an interest in:

• The power of large corporations to force rules on their customers, rules that always favor the corporation.  In particular it is looking at rules that require arbitration to resolve disputes.   The offending language is:

". . .the company 'may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.'

Those nine words are at the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies like American Express devised a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to apply for a credit card, use a cellphone, get cable or Internet service, or shop online without agreeing to private arbitration. The same applies to getting a job, renting a car or placing a relative in a nursing home."

[Added later:  I should also add that attorneys have lots of incentives to fight for their ability to file class action lawsuits.  And that my sense is many of those suits only bring in money for attorneys because either the individuals don't understand all the paperwork needed to make a claim, or they do understand and decide that for the small amount they might possibly get, it's not worth all the work.]

• The impossibility of consumers actually reading all the contracts they have to agree to these days.  For a particularly egregious example, see my post on the iTunes update agreement back in 2013.
• Among many disturbing aspects of this issue, is how this change was carried out and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' role in this.

" . . .the move to block class actions was engineered by a Wall Street-led coalition of credit card companies and retailers, according to interviews with coalition members and court records. Strategizing from law offices on Park Avenue and in Washington, members of the group came up with a plan to insulate themselves from the costly lawsuits. Their work culminated in two Supreme Court rulings, in 2011 and 2013, that enshrined the use of class-action bans in contracts. The decisions drew little attention outside legal circles, even though they upended decades of jurisprudence put in place to protect consumers and employees.

One of the players behind the scenes, The Times found, was John G. Roberts Jr., who as a private lawyer representing Discover Bank unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a case involving class-action bans. By the time the Supreme Court handed down its favorable decisions, he was the chief justice."

 The problem for me isn't that a group of people come together to change the law.  That happens all the time for things like civil rights, environmental protection, and other important causes.  But the Constitutional narrative of James Madison was that competing powers would mean that laws would be just because people would challenge misuses of power.  And that's what seems to be happening in the LIO case mentioned above.  However, given the huge inequality in the distribution of wealth in the United States today, the ability to challenge large corporations becomes harder and harder.  The ability of corporations to draft legislation for the legislators they've funded, to change the laws in their own favor, grows increasingly hard to challenge. 


3.  A Washington Post article reprinted on page A-7 of the ADN explaining that supporters see Trump as the candidate who can restore America's greatness.   Trying to understand the motivations of Trump and other candidates is something I always want to do.  I think it is often more complicated than is normally reported.  Unfortunately, the reporter's tone is a bit flip (not to the snark level).  But he does point out that 'when America was last great' varies from person to person, and how Trump is going to restore this lost quality isn't clear.  But let's look at a couple of the examples of the good old days.

• ". . . the last time America was great was when Ronald Reagan was president, when people played by the rules."   

Let's see, the 1980's included the savings and loan scandal, Iran Contra,  Reagan's Chief of Staff was convicted of lying to Congress and more. Jimmy Swaggart and Jimmy Baker scandals, and in sports Pete Rose was betting on his games and Ben Johnson got his Olympic Gold metal with steroids. 

• ". . . it was in the ’70s, Holly Martin says, when you could depend on Americans to work hard."   

When the US had the largest number of union members who still had some power to negotiate with their employers?  When the pay ratio between the CEO and the lowest paid employees was about 20-1 compared to today's 350 - 1? [Clearly related to inequality of wealth mentioned in the class action suit article.]  And jobs were easy to get because so many men were fighting in a controversial war in Vietnam and women were supposed to stay home and raise the kids?

• " . . .to find true American greatness, Steve Trivett contends, you need to go back to before the Vietnam War, “when you could still own a home and have a good job even if you didn’t have a college education.”

You mean just before the Civil Rights Act when whites didn't have to compete with blacks for jobs?  And redlining meant blacks couldn't get loans to buy houses?  

• “The last time we had good jobs and respect for the military and law enforcement was, oh, probably during Eisenhower.” 

When income tax rates in the US were at their all time highest, the largest percentage of US workers were unionized, and when Southern police and courts looked the other way when blacks were lynched?  That was right after WW II and before Vietnam tore the country apart.  

All this selective memory echoes the theme of the play I just saw Other Desert Cities.  We all remember things differently.  And none of those decades were calm and peaceful. They all had strong conflicts. 

4.  Local hockey player squeezes in grandmother's and great aunt's funerals in Saskatchewan before leading his team to victory back in Anchorage.  Here's a kid whose family obligations came before his team obligations.  It involved three plane changes each way (and a hefty bill, I'm sure).  On the lucky side, instead of the normal Fri-Sat games, it's a Sat-Sun series.  A good story and my condolences and congratulations.