What Happens When Your Parents Aren't Who You Think They Are?

When raising the issue of epistemology (very loosely, how do you know what's true?) with my students, I'd sometimes ask things like, "How do you know your mother is your mother?"

It quickly become obvious that all their evidence is second hand.  They have evidence (such as birth certificates)  and what other people tell them.  But there is always a possibility that there mother really isn't their mother.  Maybe she's their grandmother and their sister is their mother.  Or maybe they're adopted.  It's a good opening to issues of knowing what is true and the different rules different people use to verify truth.

But this story I'm going to link to is even more unlikely.  What if your mother is really your biological mother, but she's not who you think she is.

The Guardian has a story Saturday of two Canadian-born, naturalized American brothers, who, well, here's the beginning of the article:

Tim Foley turned 20 on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both brothers were born in Canada, but for the past decade the family had lived in the US. The boys’ father, Donald Heathfield, had studied in Paris and at Harvard, and now had a senior role at a consultancy firm based in Boston. Their mother, Tracey Foley, had spent many years focused on raising her children, before taking a job as a real estate agent. To those who knew them, they seemed a very ordinary American family, albeit with Canadian roots and a penchant for foreign travel. Both brothers were fascinated by Asia, a favoured holiday destination, and the parents encouraged their sons to be inquisitive about the world: Alex was only 16, but had just returned from a six-month student exchange in Singapore. 

After a buffet lunch, the four returned home and opened a bottle of champagne to toast Tim reaching his third decade. The brothers were tired; they had thrown a small house party the night before to mark Alex’s return from Singapore, and Tim planned to go out later. After the champagne, he went upstairs to message his friends about the evening’s plans. There came a knock at the door, and Tim’s mother called up that his friends must have come early, as a surprise. 

At the door, she was met by a different kind of surprise altogether: a team of armed, black-clad men holding a battering ram. They streamed into the house, screaming, “FBI!” Another team entered from the back; men dashed up the stairs, shouting at everyone to put their hands in the air. Upstairs, Tim had heard the knock and the shouting, and his first thought was that the police could be after him for underage drinking: nobody at the party the night before had been 21, and Boston police took alcohol regulations seriously. 

When he emerged on to the landing, it became clear the FBI was here for something far more serious. The two brothers watched, stunned, as their parents were put in handcuffs and driven away in separate black cars. Tim and Alex were left behind with a number of agents, who said they needed to begin a 24-hour forensic search of the home; they had prepared a hotel room for the brothers. One of the men told them their parents had been arrested on suspicion of being “unlawful agents of a foreign government”.

The reporter follows up on many of the questions you're probably asking yourselves.  Here's the link again.

This is a great story for a high school class - I can't imagine any high school students who wouldn't be totally sucked into this story and imagining what it would be like if this happened to them.  And there are lots of lessons a teacher could get the students to explore.

Why Is John Doe Being Treated So Differently From Snowden, Manning, And Assange?

The Wiki-Leaks source Bradley Manning was condemned as a traitor and convicted to 35 years in prison.

Edward Snowden is stuck in Moscow facing espionage charges if he gets anywhere he could be extradited to the US.

Julian Assange, the head of Wiki-Leaks is still in the Bolivian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, and, he fears, from there to the US.

But when the Panama Papers came out, the media and politicians focused on the contents, not the leaker.  I don't hear cries for him to be in prison.

There are differences, to be sure.  Manning and Snowden exposed US secrets.  Manning as an employee of the US and Snowden working for a US contractor.  Yet Snowden's leaks have led to worldwide outrage about US data collection and changes in the law to provide more protections.  The Wiki-Leaks have proven embarrassing, but despite early claims about risking the lives of US military, I have been unable to find evidence this has happened.


And now we have the Panama Papers.  Leaked by someone who has recently identified himself as John Doe.  Instead of calling for John Doe to be punished, we see headlines like this:

"Obama: Panama Papers leak shines light on 'big global problem'"

and

Panama Papers: US launches crackdown on international tax evasion

OK, I get it that these papers weren't leaked from secret government files, but rather from a private law firm practicing out of Panama.

But economic espionage is a big deal.  From the New York Times:

"The private sector spent $665 million on data loss prevention last year, according to the technology research firm Gartner, with a 15 percent increase expected this year. On the legislative front, Congress strengthened penalties for those convicted under the Economic Espionage Act, raising the maximum fine for individuals convicted to $5 million from $500,000. And in terms of law enforcement, the F.B.I. lists digital crime, including intrusions that result in trade secret theft, as its third priority, just behind terrorism and counterintelligence. The agency reported a 60 percent increase in trade secret investigations from 2009 through 2013."  [emphasis added]

Is Obama ignoring the cyber theft of data from a private company because the information that was stolen was important for the public good?  After all, that's the argument that Wiki-Leaks and Edward Snowden make.  They didn't do to help a foreign country.  They didn't do it for money.  They did it because they thought something terribly wrong was going on.

Just like John Doe did with the Panama Papers.

Or is it because the Wiki-Leaks and Snowden leak were embarrassing to the President - both because security was so bad and because the information leaked was embarrassing and revealed that the American public was being lied to as well as being spied on massively?

But the Panama Papers are different because they help to support a point that Obama has been making about American companies avoiding taxes through off shore tax havens?

I keep mentioning John Doe.  I was looking at Panama Papers yesterday and discovered that the person who leaked them has posted very recently his reasons for doing that and for taking the name John Doe.  Here are some excerpts from "John Doe's Manifesto."

He begins by identifying his critical issue:  world wide income inequality.  And even though people are talking about it, it hasn't really been adequately dealt with and there are many questions.

"The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. . . 

Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known."

He's pleased that the Panama Papers seem to have now started a serious debate on the topic.

He introduces himself.

"For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. 

Now, some have claimed the CIA is behind this leak.  If true that would help explain why this was so handy for Obama to use in his speech on off-shore tax havens.   Is John Doe's manifesto released now intended by the real leaker to counter those rumors?  Or is it the CIA's way of denying the rumors?  There's nothing in the manifesto that suggests how John Doe knew about all this and had access to it all.  He does point out, by way of justifying this fuzziness about his identity,  that there are a lot of people who would like to see the leaker dead and I don't doubt that.

My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described. 

[For those who do not speak German - most people, I'd guess -  Süddeutsche Zeitung means, literally, South German Newspaper.]

He goes on to say that he's hoping that a lot of prosecutions will result from these revelations.  (There were some resignations by people like the Prime Minister of Iceland and the head of a Chilean anti-corruption agency when the leak was first made public.)

The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment. 

In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able. "

Besides prosecution of wrongdoers, he wants immunity for whistleblowers.

"Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents. 

In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers."

He wants campaign reform in the US. 

"It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait."

Then he lists all the players he think have failed.

Governments have failed (and he cites a number of examples including:

"Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network at the United States Treasury, just announced her resignation to work instead for HSBC, one of the most notorious banks on the planet (not coincidentally headquartered in London). And so the familiar swish of America’s revolving door echoes amidst deafening global silence from thousands of yet-to-be-discovered ultimate beneficial owners who are likely praying that her replacement is equally spineless.

Banks, financial regulators and tax authorities have failed. . .

Hopelessly backward and inefficient courts have failed. . ."

The media have failed.

"The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organizations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story [Panama Papers.] Even Wikileaks didn’t answer its tip line repeatedly. 

But most of all, the legal profession has failed. . ."

We live in interesting times.   There's a lot of interesting stuff on the Panama Papers website and the graphics are outstanding too.   The size of this leak dwarfs previous leaks.  The website has graphics comparing it to Snowden's and Wiki-Leaks. [UPDATE May 8, 2016: I wish though, that they'd put publication dates on their stories.]

I'd just note that the move to computers and then to the internet has made private conversations and messages that the socially, politically, and economically prominent have used to hide their shady dealings available in a way they could never have imagined.  And hackers are following Eastern martial arts philosophies that teach how to use one's opponent's strength against him.

Budding And Blooming

Spring's transformation in Anchorage is pretty spectacular.  We go from snow, to brown, then there's this explosion of things popping out of the ground to reclaim their place in the sun for five months.  We've got one big, proud red tulip.

A lily bud.

I think this is the chocolate lily bud, but I'm not sure.  I'll have to see what comes out.

And here's a bleeding heart bud.  

How We 'Know' Things Determines How We Handle Them. Old Age, Mental Health, Death

A book -

Atul Gawande's Being Mortal   

a movie

Healing Voices -  

and this

 LA Times article about medical error being the third highest cause of death behind heart attacks and cancer 

all have come together this week.  Their topics overlap somewhat, but more important, they all are great examples of the theme of this blog - how do we know what we know?

Being Mortal  is a doctor's reflections on how the medical profession thinks about and thus handles older patients.  Doctors, he tells us, are trained to cure people, but old folks aren't going to get better.  Doctors are technicians he tells us, so they fix the various discrete parts rather than the whole person.  By extension, as old folks begin to fall, get frail and forgetful, safety, not happiness, becomes the main concern of doctors and nursing homes.  What older folks need though, is to have some feeling of control of their lives.  Being ripped out of their environments and moved into sterile nursing homes takes away that control and all the cues that remind them of who they are.    

He writes extensively about the kinds of care available for people in the latter stages of life.  And he gives examples of places that are changing, compromising safety a bit to make being human the top priority - such as the doctor who stuck living (instead of the plastic) plants in every room, parakeets in every room, and dogs and cats throughout the facility and witnessed people coming back to life.  He had to overcome staff resistance as well as board and regulatory concerns, but it had huge positive effects on the people in their institution.   Here's an excerpt:

"The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant  The problem is that they have had almost no view at all.  Medicine's focus is narrow.  Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.  Yet --- and this is the painful paradox ---  we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.  For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns.  It's been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs.  

That experiment has failed. "

Having just watched my mother go through this, I find all this very compelling.  I first learned about the book about a year ago when my mother's neighbor recommended it and said, "Steve, keeping your mom at home was the right decision."  It was reassuring at the time, but I didn't start to read the book until it became this month's choice in my book club.

Keeping her at home where she could eat what she wanted to eat, when she wanted to eat it, at her own dining table, on her own dishes, seemed important.  Letting her sit in her wheel chair on her front porch among the plants and flowers she had tended for 60 years, seemed important.  We were incredibly lucky to find a caregiver she clicked with and to be able to pay for the caregiver and regular flights to Los Angeles.  That's a luxury.

And now I'm reading it with myself in mind.  How will my family and I deal with me when I get to that point of not being able to care for myself?  Ideally, I'll just sleep in one morning never to awaken just as I'm getting to that point, but that's wishful thinking.

Healing Voices  was a film we saw this week at the Bear Tooth about how the medical field thinks about mental health, the influence of the drug companies on doctors, and the need for patients to be treated as whole people and not to be labeled in ways that dismiss them as unable to be a part of their own recovery.  Here's the trailer:






Finally, the identification of medical error as the third highest cause of death after heart attacks and cancer, is another example.  Error wasn't considered a disease, so it wasn't listed as the cause of death, and so it wasn't identified as something to be addressed with the same urgency as diseases.  Again - how one sees the world, classifies what one sees, affects profoundly what one notices, and thus the options available for making effective changes.  An excerpt:

"The CDC currently has no good way of tracking deaths that result from medical mistakes, the authors wrote. The agency’s statistics are pulled from the International Classification of Diseases codes that appear on death certificates. These codes were instituted in 1949 and do not include any that indicate a death was the result of a mistake in the hospital."

All three examples involve a mental picture of the world that tells the person (or group of people) what the important values are and what parts of the world to pay attention to.  In each of these cases, those models left out very important aspects of the situations they were trying to improve.  Thus their solutions were inadequate and even harmful.

Each of us filter the world around us with various models that focus on some things and block out other.  I find no other explanation to why people watching the same presidential election, come to wildly different conclusions about whom to vote for.  It's important to constantly be testing one's own models.  It's also important to avoid simply dismiss the other guy as 'crazy,'  but to try to understand the model he's using to rationally get to his very different conclusions.  That's when communication and change can happen.

"... body was found near the north end of the Savage River Loop Trail . . .Searchers believe he died Tuesday."

If the title quotes from the Alaska Dispatch are accurate, J and I hiked apparently right below Michael Purdy's body, "about 100 feet from the trail" when we hiked the Savage River Loop Trail on Wednesday morning.

100 feet.  That's about the distance across two average Anchorage residential lots.

It changes everything about our hike.  From a magnificent soul cleansing hike on a partly cloudy day, with the sun's glow following us from behind clouds to the east. . .  To?  I'm not sure what.  A much more sobering and poignant walk.  A reminder of how instantly everything can change.   If Michael died Tuesday night, there wouldn't have been anything we could have done for him, even if we had seen him.  This is pretty early in the season, and we didn't see other hikers Wednesday morning, though there were cars in the parking lot Monday evening and when we passed Tuesday, headed further into the park.  Savage River is far enough into the Park, that I couldn't get any cell service.

The maintained trail ends at the bridge.  We went on a little further.   A Park Service announcement says Michael Purdy's car was in the east parking lot.  So he probably took the trail on the east side.  We took the west side trail both ways because the east side had large patches of icy snow covering the trail.

If I had taken this picture with a wider angle lens, Michael Purdy's body might have been in the picture.  Or, more likely, it would have been hidden behind a rock or a ridge or bushes.  Obviously, we didn't see it.   I was looking up the slope, hoping to see Dall Sheep.  (I didn't, though we saw three bears along the river on the other side of the highway Tuesday evening.)  This is looking from past the end of the maintained trail, back to the south. You can see parts of the loop trail along both sides of the river.  (East on the left, west on the right.)  These pictures are all from Wednesday morning, April 27, 2016.

click to better focus any of the pictures

Here's J resting on the unmaintained trail beyond the bridge, which is below her hidden by the ridge.  And somewhere nearby was Michael Purdy.

There are lots of great rock outcroppings that just beg to be explored.  Our creaky old bones can more easily resist the call to climb.  But at 24, I would have been all over them.




















These two outcroppings are a little beyond the bridge and the maintained trail.

The Park Service announcement says Michael was from Oregon and was scheduled to work at Denali for the summer, that he was an experienced hiker.

Some may think this post a little macabre.  But it seems that the timing requires me to share these pictures.

My brother died in a fall when he was 23, so I know how wrenching this is for Michael's family.  Forty years later, writing this,  I can't stop tears from forming.   I know that my mother wanted to go to the site of my brother's death and see every detail.  Perhaps these pictures may help some of his family members who can't get to this spot.  At least Michael took leave in a spectacularly beautiful place - which these pictures only hint at - doing what he apparently loved doing.  My condolences go out to Michael's family.  The memory of these days will never leave you, but it gets less painful.  I only wish we could have done something to help.    

"Tells It Like It Is"? More Like Tells It As He Sees It.

Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's campaign manager is quoted in the Alaska Dispatch yesterday (from a Washington Post article by Dan Balz) as saying:

“. . . his appeal has been as a person who tells it like it is.”

Call it spin or framing, we have to be careful to keep our crap detectors well maintained so we don't let these memes slip into our brains uninspected.

Wikipedia explains memes this way (in part, there's lots more at the link):

A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture". A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

This is the best word I can think of to describe what I mean here - that someone says something like "tells it like it is" and this idea spreads quickly, like a virus, and people begin to think of Trump as someone who tells it like it is, which implies that he know the truth and doesn't hesitate to say it.  And that has a lot of appeal for Americans who are used to politicians waffling or being outright deceptive ("I did not have sex with that woman.")

I do believe that Trump is a man who is used to getting away with saying what he thinks, at least in many situations.  I suspect when he is wooing an investor, he's more likely to edit his thoughts a bit and even prevaricate so he can tell the investor what he (Trump) thinks the investor wants to hear.

And up till now, the bedrock of Republican voters - conservative, older white males who feel their country is being taken away from them by non-whites and women, whether born Americans or immigrants - have been Trump's investors.  He's done a great job in getting them to invest their votes in his candidacy.

But the rest of us shouldn't let our brains be invaded by misleading memes.  "Telling it like it is" works great for Trump, but I'd suggest he's really "Telling it like he sees it."  

By that I mean he's saying what he thinks will sway voters to come out to vote for him.  Whether he actually believes what he says or only thinks it will persuade his target audience, I still don't know.  I suspect sometimes it's the one and sometimes the other.  I do believe that he believes life is a game and the only way to play is to win.  But at the end of each game, he forgets the losses, remembers the wins, and focuses on the next game.

So he could honestly praise Cruz, after he suspended his campaign,  From Newsmax:

"I have met some of the most incredible competitors that I have ever competed against right here in the Republican Party," Trump said to cheering supporters at his victory speech at Trump Tower in New York City.
"We started off with 17 — and just so you understand, Ted Cruz, I don't know if he likes me or if he doesn't like me, but he is one hell of a competitor.
"He is a tough, smart guy," Trump continued. "And he has got an amazing future. He's got an amazing future. 

The primary game, in Trump's mind, is now over, and Trump can just forget all the mean and nasty things he said about Cruz and Cruz said about him.  That was all just rhetoric in the game.  (As opposed to 'telling it like it is.')

Now his competitor is presumed to be Hillary Clinton and he's going to play to win this new game just as vigorously.  He's got new investors to woo, and we'll see how much of what he's been saying he believes and how much he changes his game for voters who prioritize their values differently from Republican primary voters.

The Sweet Peas Are Happening

I planted a row of sweet peas in the planter on the deck on April 3.  That's pushing the Alaska growing season a bit, but it seemed reasonably safe.

• We've had one of the warmest winters on record 
• Spring planting has been possible earlier over the years
• Our garden columnist Jeff Lowenfells was encouraging folks to push things early
• Sweet peas are one of the more cold resistant annuals
• I was going to cover the box with plastic tops from Costco trays

So, when we got back from our trip on April 21, I checked for shoots.  Nada.  Well, no sweet peas.  There was plenty of chickweed.  I checked again several days ago.  Still saw nothing and decided to pull the chickweed.  Carefully, lest there be a sweet pea hidden among the weeds.  

Yesterday I thought that either

• the seeds just haven't germinated and sprouted yet, but they're still coming
• the seeds were bad - they were from last year or the year before

I decided to put in another row of sweet peas.  This time from an unopened seed envelope from last year.  So I put them in a little water to get things moving before I planted them.  If the earlier seeds came up, it would be fine.  If they didn't, I didn't want to wait too long before planting more.  

So today, I was going to plant them.  I went out and took the plastic covers off the planter and pulled out more chickweed.  And as I was doing this, lo and behold, I saw sweet pea shoot sticking out of the soil.  And then another, and another.  There were maybe five out of the fifty or so I planted.  

I really don't think they were there yesterday, but as you can see, they are fairly easy to overlook.  It still amazes me when I see new sprouts poking out of the soil.  

I don't think I'll need the seeds that I've soaked in this planter.  It will just get too crowded if most of the old seeds sprout.  But now that they've soaked overnight, I need to plant them soon.  I'll put them in another planter in the front.  The trees there keep this spot from getting as much sun as sweet peas need, but trees are an issue (overall a good one) in most of my yard.  I'll show you the sweet peas when they are booming.  

While Legislators Plot Raiding Permanent Fund, Russell Read, The Fund's New CIO, Starts May 9

 image from Professional Pensions

It looks like the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation has done a pretty good job of hiring a new Chief Investment Officer.  Russell Read, who is due to begin his duties in Juneau May 9, has had an
illustrious career and  Alaskans should be pleased with the man who's coming to manage our $52 billion fund.

But I suspect few have any idea of who he is or what he brings to the job.  Here are a couple of positions he's had at important funds,  and below is more information about these funds and about Read.  There's also an excerpt from a recent interview regarding his new position.

• Chief Investment Officer of CalPERS - the California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest one, with some $300 billion (two years)
• Chief Investment Officer and Deputy Chief Executive of the Kuwait City-based Gulf Investment Corporation (GIC) ($7 billion) which is the Development Investor created and owned by the six GCC countries of the Arabian Peninsula. (four years)

Here are more details about CalPERS from Wikipedia:

As of June 30, 2014, CalPERS managed the largest public pension fund in the United States, with $300.3 billion in assets[1] CalPERS is known for its shareholder activism; stocks placed on its "Focus List" may perform better than other stocks, which has given rise to the term "CalPERS effect". Outside the U.S., CalPERS has been called "a recognized global leader in the investment industry",[6] and "one of America's most powerful shareholder bodies”.

The Security and Exchange Commission's bio of Read described his duties at CalPERS and at a previous position:

Russell Read is [I'll leave their present tense of the original bio]  the Chief Investment Officer for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). He oversees all asset classes in which CalPERS invests, including domestic and international equity, Treasury and agency debt, high yield bonds, mortgage backed securities, CDOs, real estate, corporate governance, currency overlay, securities lending, venture capital, leveraged buyouts, and hedge funds. Mr. Read is responsible for the strategic plan for CalPERS’ Investment Office including tactical asset allocation, risk management, business development, budget authority, new investment programs, trading technology, staffing, and back office operations. Mr. Read joined CalPERS on June 1, 2006 after previously serving as Deputy Chief Investment Officer for Deutsche Asset Management and Scudder Investments. He was responsible for more than $250 billion of retail and institutional investments in equity, fixed income, and commodity-based products. He also was Chairman of the Deutsche’s Americas Investment Committee and principal investment representative to the firm’s retail mutual fund board of trustees. He previously served as Global Head of Quantitative Investing and Research at Zurich Scudder and has held senior investment positions with the OppenheimerFunds, CNA Insurance, Prudential Insurance, and First Chicago.

Here's what Bloomberg says about the Gulf Investment Corporation:

Gulf Investment Corporation is a venture capital arm of The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf specializing in direct investments in private companies and new business ventures. The firm prefers to invest in the utilities sector with a focus on power, water, telecommunications, and other infrastructure; chemicals and metals; diversified industrials; materials; healthcare; agriculture, consumer staples; Industrial Development; consumer discretionary; financials; financial services, petrochemicals, steel, and electricity. It seeks to invest in GCC countries. It also invests in corporate finance projects. Gulf Investment Corporation was founded in 1983 and is based in Kuwait City.

Investeurope has a bio of Read when he was a speaker and it includes some additional information:

Dr. Read has been a resource for regulatory agencies internationally, state governments, the US Congress, and the US Senate for over two decades and served as Chairman of the Investors’ Committee of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets under Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
He is currently a Governor of both the Hedge Funds Standards Board (London) and the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS). He was named as one of America’s 30 most influential players in business and finance by SmartMoney (November 2007) and #35 on Institutional Investor’s list of the 75 most effective chief executives.

That Dr. before his name came with a Phd in Political Economy from Stanford.  His prior education includes an undergraduate degree in Statistics and an MBA in Finance and International Business, both from the University of Chicago.  He has a second masters in Economics from Stanford.


And here's an interview with Read, published a couple of days ago, about what he's thinking as he approaches his Alaskan job.  Here's the end of the interview:

Skorina: APFC earned 4.9 percent in FY 2015; maybe not as strong a performance as they would have wished?
Read: Real estate did well, 9.8 percent on about 10 percent of the portfolio. And private equity was up 16.5 percent. U.S. equities were up 7.2 percent. But the more pertinent question is: where are the income and growth opportunities to come from in the years ahead, given this strange bond environment.
For a century, bonds were the bedrock of investments and retirement income. Since 2008 that has been turned on its head. Now, bonds are low-yield and high-risk. So, at a fund like APFC, we need to look for opportunities where size matters and we have an edge, things like real estate, infrastructure, or geographic opportunities.
Skorina: What do you mean by geographic opportunities?
Read: Well, let’s look out over the next twenty to thirty years. We’re long-term money, so where are long-term opportunities? Where is the growth to come from? Sixty 60 percent of the population growth over the next 35 years—to 2050—will come in Africa and south Asia, mostly in cities.
My job in Kuwait kept me hopping around Africa and Asia looking at infrastructure projects, and I’ve been able to see a lot of this growth first hand. There are all kinds of frustrations and obstacles you can’t imagine compared to the developed world, but the cities are still going up.
So what sectors and companies will benefit if you’re going to build new cities? It will be technology, communications, and infrastructure.
Skorina: I seem to recall that you’re an ardent musician. Do you still play the trumpet and sax? I imagine those long, cold winters in Juneau should give you plenty of time to keep your lip in shape.
Read: Funny you should mention that Charles. I’ve been looking into it and, as it turns out, Juneau has an active and sophisticated music community. I’m looking forward to my new home as well as my new job.

The original announcement of Read's appointment by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation said he was starting on May 9, though Skorina says he gets to Juneau on May 1.

I'd also note that I have never met Mr. Read, but he is a good friend of a friend of someone I know well.

Why Do Ponds Freeze Differently?

I'm afraid this post raises questions rather than answering them.   Limited time and physics savvy make this necessary.  But there are some links to offer a little bit.

These are pictures of frozen puddles I saw at Denali.  And naturally I wanted to know why they were so different.

First this one in our campsite the first morning.  Why did the ice freeze in the long roundish spikes?

Second, why did this puddle freeze round, but then have more angular geometric patterns in the middle?

I'd note, the next morning, there was no more ice.  In fact these two puddles were gone altogether.  Just depressions in the soil.

Why is this puddle in the tundra frozen yet clear?

While this one is frozen by clouded?

The internet offers some insight into the freezing of puddles.



Here's  Story of Snow's explanation of why puddles get these curvy lines as they freeze.   Here's an excerpt (it has good illustrations too.)

"The thick, continuous curves show places where the ice is thicker underneath. Other lines may mark the boundary where the ice thickness changes. The ice thickness varies because of the way the meltwater drained below the ice. The sketch below shows a puddle just starting to freeze. We are viewing a cross-section, and the ice is coming in from the edge."

There's some conjecturing on the geometric patterns on the ice in this discussion board.

I could only find posts on why ice cubes are sometimes clear and sometimes cloudy.  Here's part of an explanation at Today I Found Out:

"The answer to this mystery lies in the temperature of the water. You see, at room temperature there are a lot of impurities that are dissolved in regular old tap water. And as you may recall from high-school chemistry, the warmer water is, the more of a given substance it is possible to dissolve in it. For example, sugar has very weak molecular bonds that require only a small amount of energy to break. Thus, as you supply water with more energy by heating it, the amount of sugar you can dissolve within it increases and vice versa. You perhaps have noticed this phenomenon when sweetening hot tea vs. cold, or after letting a sugared cup of coffee get cold, with the sugar dissolving fine when it’s hot, but showing up at the bottom of your cup when the coffee gets cold. This is essentially what happens with ice. As you cool the water, all of the impurities that were happily dissolved in it at room temperature separate themselves from the liquid and become visible."

It goes on to explain why the cloudy part is usually in the middle of the ice cube.  I suspect this could explain the differences between the puddles that were clear and that were cloudy.  But I'm not sure.

Actforlibraries  explains why puddles freeze at different temperatures.  This one is short and easy to follow.

UCSB Science Line explains why water freezes on the surface of a lake, but not below.  That seemed pretty obvious (the air temperature is colder than the ground temperature.)

Another article on the Thermodynamics of Freezing Puddles in Autumn-Winter Period looks at sea water.  I could only see the abstract and decided not to pursue the whole article since it was about fresh water.  I also wasn't sure I'd understand much of it, but someone else might find it interesting.

There's even something called an ice spike which sticks up out of the water.  I've never seen one and they're rare it says

Mike Gravel On Mike Gravel

Former Alaskan US Senator Mike Gravel spoke Thursday night at UAA, sponsored by the journalism department and Alaska Native Studies and there was a connection with the College of Business and Public Policy as well.

Gravel was elected in 1968 and served until 1981.  We came right on time and the auditorium was full and we got seats in the very back row.  This was not a good decision as they did not use miss, and as good as the acoustics are in that room, I didn't hear enough of each sentence to write too much here with confidence.  I would guess the average age in the room was around 70 and many were people who knew and/or worked with Gravel.

As one observer said afterward, "I don't remember things being quite as good as he does, but it's probably good to be able to remember your life rosier than it was."

Two points I heard clearly enough to report were:

1.  When Clinton is president the Republicans will begin impeachment hearings that will continue through her four years.

I've been telling friends that I thought the hatred and disrespect shown our first black president will be nothing compare to the invective our first female president will receive.  So this one seems pretty likely.

2.  He began by telling us how he got to Alaska.  Basically, he'd decided he wanted to be a politician and he did research on where the best states to get elected would be.  His choices narrowed down to Alaska and New Mexico.  Alaska wasn't even a state yet, but he was sure it would be soon.