Santa Monica Sunset

We spent a couple of hours at the play equipment near Santa Monica pier as Z walked the balance bars, crossed the monkey bars, climbed ropes, swang swings, and generally stretched her muscles and worked her balance.  But she didn't know she was exercising, she was just having fun.  We left as the sun was lowering over the Pacific.  (I started thinking about how to say that differently.  We know the sun doesn't lower itself, that it's the earth's rotation, not movement of the sun that causes us to move to dark in the evening.  Yet we still say rise and set.  I wonder how many people really think it's the sun moving.) (Well I googled it.  From Time:

"Does the Earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the Earth? 

When asked that question, 1 in 4 Americans surveyed answered incorrectly. Yes, 1 in 4. In other words, a quarter of Americans do not understand one of the most fundamental principles of basic science. So that’s where we are as a society right now.
The survey, conducted by the National Science Foundation, included more than 2,200 participants in the U.S., AFP reports. It featured a nine-question quiz about physical and biological science and the average score was a 6.5."

And a bit later, from Venice.

And let me slip in this picture I took as we walked back to the car.  It's one of the murals we saw at the Skirball Saturday in the Ken Gonzales-Day exhibit.  This mural is Dogtown and having seen one of the Dogtown movies explains a bit more of the mural.  

Though having grown up in this area in the late 50's and early 60's when skateboarding was invented and we simply nailed the front and back ends of roller skates to 2X4s and zoomed down the hills (our street was perfect), I'm a little skeptical of getting background from a Chicago based movie critic.

Durrell Loses Control Of His Story

As a blogger, I find that what I write doesn't always go the way I planned.  Thus, while visiting someone today, when I picked up  Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals from their bookshelf and read the introduction, I could sympathize.

"This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu.  It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages.  Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite friends to share the chapters.  It was only with the greatest difficulty, and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I cold devote exclusively to animals."

I knew who Lawrence Durrell was, but not Gerald.  It turns out he was Lawrence's younger brother, but also a well known animal conservationist in his own right.  Here's Wikipedia's bio.

Surface Tension LA and Noah's Ark

The Skirball Museum was chosen as a kid friendly meeting place for my daughter and an old friend.  There were two dynamite exhibits - one temporary and one permanent.  If you're ever in LA with young kids, be sure to check out the permanent one.



First The Temp Exhibit - Surface Tension LA


The most striking thing when you walk into the room is the map of LA on the floor.  It has every street. But no names.  It goes from the beach on the west to way off in the east, well past East LA.  I confess, it's part of LA I don't know at much about and there were no red circles with numbers out there so I didn't look too carefully.  North/south is more constrained - from the near valley north to not even LAX to the south.  There's a bit of South LA that goes out the doorway into the hall.

Z immediately began running the freeways.

And you can also see the red circles that have numbers.

The numbers show the locations of murals which are pictured on the wall.  The picture below just shows a few of them.

Just checking out the city and trying to figure out where places were without the street names.  It made curved streets make more sense in this huge map format.  And then there were all the murals.  Some of which I knew - including the "Pope of LA" that we saw in downtown the other day.

And the security guard was really into the project, asking us what we thought it meant.  He went on to say something about no one mural tells the story, but the combination of all the murals makes a statement.

Ken Gonzales-Day who conceived of this project and took thousands of pictures of murals, wrote on a description of the exhibit in the room:

"I believe these images reveal more about Los Angeles and its communities, its struggles and its losses, than one can find in any book.  I witnessed memorials to those lost and to those who inspire, as well as the rage and political frustration of city residents, and even resistance to displacement.  In a city of contested spaces, these are traces of its people:  material celebrations and negotiations of the politics of place, often painted side by side."

Gonzales-Day is an art professor at Scripps College in Claremont.  His personal website has more on his art, including a larger picture of this exhibit with many more of the murals.  It's the third dot at the top of the page.


Second, The Permanent Exhibit - Noah's Ark

I have to say upfront that this is the best interactive kid space I can recall ever having been to, and I've been to a lot.  It's aesthetically beautiful, it's resourceful, imaginative, and full of interesting things for kids - and adults - to do.  They also limit how many people can be in the space - you get tickets that are good for a specific 90 minute block.  We had 2pm-3:30 on the Saturday before Christmas.  There was lots of room for the kids to explore.

If you live in LA and have young kids (3-9 is probably ideal) or your visiting from out of town, this is a great spot to go.  It's not photogenic - big pictures don't show the detail, which is what's so amazing, and pictures of the details miss out on how it all fits together.  Maybe it would be fairer to say I wasn't up to the task of digitally capturing this place.  Plus I only had my small camera with me and my kids have a ban on family pictures on the blog.

But here are a few attempts.

There's just so much going on in the room, so many nooks and crannies, so many animals, things to push or pull or crank or climb up, under, into.  This is one room that is 'inside the ark.'

We first got a kid friendly intro to what we were going to see.  Part one was the storm, with rain and wind and lightning.  Part two is the ark.  Part three is the rainbow, a room where everyone can work with paper and colored pencils and stencils.  World Immigration Day was earlier in the week, so there was a place to write notes to immigrants and hang them up.

Most everything in this exhibit is made of recycled objects.  As you can see, the elephant's trunk is partly made of bamboo steamer baskets. It was all very clever.  Like this alligator, made out of a violin case, violin and the teeth are little plastic tubes.

In the storm room, there were lots of cranks to turn.  This one made lightning in the glass tube.  Another blew air into a tube  showing wind as the leaves inside flew all over.  And there were drums and other ways to recreate thunder.

There were neat ways to climb up.  A pulley to send messages or whatever up to folks on a different level.














And interesting ways to get back down.

There wasn't any real biblical indoctrination - just the most basic telling of the story of Noah's ark and the animals.  They even had fake animal poop in the section of the ark that held the animals.  And brooms and dustbins to clean it up with.

A truly wonderful place for young kids to explore and climb and have great adventures.

Here's where you can learn a lot more about Noah's Ark.

DTLA With My Granddaughter and Wife Part 2: Who Killed Liberty, Maiolino, And Roses

[Part 1 is here.]

We left off in the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles.  As we moved along we came across this image of the statue of liberty by Daniel Joseph Martinez.  When I found the title - Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It's the Sound of Inevitability, The Sound of Your Death - it made sense.  But I wondered about more politically conservative people.  How might they react to this?  Even though they rail against government, how their religious rights are violated by things like gay marriage, how they are economically less well off, etc., would they appreciate this symbol of all those things?  Or would they see it as a desecration of a traditional monument to freedom?  Or have they soured on the Statue of Liberty because it represents a pro-immigration stance?

click on image to enlarge and focus

Then we walked a little further and saw this work extended into the next room.    This  second picture was taken by Z, my four year old partner in crime.  She has had no trouble picking up how to turn on the camera, how to press part way to focus, take the picture, then  open the window and press the view button, then move from picture to picture.  And her composition isn't bad either, though she did cut off the base of the statue.  The base is a mirror and she got in trouble with the guard for touching it.  My wife was closer to Z at the time, so she got written up, though the guard was apologetic and said there was clearly no damage and nothing would come of it.  

The main exhibit was by an artist I'd never heard of - Anna Maria Maiolino - but who had a large body of work in many different media.   There was a large room of pieces with torn paper, some of which was sewn up, or thread played a key role in the image.  Here are a couple of examples of the torn paper without thread.  (My camera had difficulty knowing what to do - I take that as a tribute to the artist who was tricking the camera's auto settings and chiding my slow progress in mastering the manual commands.  The first two attempts came out almost white.)

Here's a close up of another one with torn paper.  I think the original was much whiter, but I don't have it in front of me, so I'm not going to try to fiddle with the photo to replicate something I'm not sure of.

Here's something on the artist.

This one was called By A Thread and shows the artist in the center attached by threads to her mother and daughter.






And this one is The Hero.

But let's look at different media.






I was enjoying the shapes and positioning and textures and the imagination that created these pieces, I really wasn't of thinking about what it all meant, so I didn't take pictures of the descriptions, so I can't give these names.

Don't know what these are, but I do remember looking to see what they are made of - cement.

And finally, still Maiolino,

You can see a lot more images of her work at the MOCA website.


One of the downtown places I'd never been to, but had heard about and wanted to see was the Last Book Store.  But first, this mural we passed as we walked to the bookstore.  An exhibit on murals in LA we saw today at the Skirball says this is Eloy Torrez' "Pope of Broadway."  The sun was brightly reflecting off the wall fading out the colors, and with a four year old in tow, it's harder to run back up the block to from where the colors were better.

Then finally to The Last Bookstore.

I'm afraid I was expecting the most incredible bookstore ever.  It isn't.  Powell's in Portland is much better.  I like Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle better.  This one is quirkier than those two.









This building was a bank before it became a bookstore (a transformation I highly approve of.)  You can even go into the old safe to peruse books.  Maybe I just needed more time to get the feel of this place, but I as I walked through aisles and aisles of books, books weren't calling out to me to stop and pick them up.  And there are lots of signs saying, "No public restrooms."   This was more a bookstore in a gritty downtown block that seemed to be trying to figure out how to discourage the homeless.

It wasn't warm and inviting.  There were some places to sit and read, but not enough.

Z found a book she liked in the kids' section and her grandmother, of course, made sure it came home with us.  We wandered down to the Metro station - Z never stopped looking around, never complained about anything, and when I asked if she wanted to stop at the rose garden on the way home enthusiastically said yes.  So we got off at the Exposition Park station for a quick fragrance check on as many roses as we could before the next train came by.

This is a rose garden that I visited as a young child myself.  The Natural History Museum is nearby as well as the coliseum,

Wikipedia says the garden is seven acres.

"In 1986, plans to dig up the garden to build an underground parking garage led to protests in the media.^[15][17] The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial opposing the plan: "There are times when the leaders of Los Angeles seem perversely intent on living up to the image that many outsiders have of them—insensitive and uncouth rabbits who would, say, dig up a garden to put in a parking lot."^[18] The garden had also been threatened by an earlier proposal by the Los Angeles Raiders football team to convert the garden into a practice field for the team.^[16] In order to protect the garden from such threats, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991."

I also read that the garden is closed from January 1 to March 1 for pruning, so this was likely the last chance to see these flowers this year for us.

And as I look at this last picture, I can't help but see similarities between this rose and the Disney Concert Hall that began Part 1 of these DTLA posts.

DTLA With My Granddaughter And Wife Part 1- Gehry, Rothko, and Ray

We took the Metro downtown Thursday, checked out the Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry - one of my favorite buildings anywhere.  It's a photographer's dream.

Looking Up

A passage way

Gehry isn't my focus here and these pictures are probably mystifying to someone who doesn't know this building.  You can see other images I've taken of the Disney Concert Hall here.

The Disney Concert Hall is across from the Broad Museum.  The Broad is only a little over a year old can get tickets online, but when I've tried early the first day of the month, it was always already sold out.  You can wait in line and get tickets made available that day.  So we thought we'd try that.  But two hours waiting in line didn't seem like a good use of our time.  Especially with a  four year old.  (Almost five she'd tell you.)
and it's free.  The image to the right is from the Disney garden looking down at the line for the Broad - this is the part that is around the block from the entrance.  Those are people to the left of the cars at the bottom of the picture.

So we walked down the block and went to MOCA - the Museum of Contemporary Art.  This isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I love art work that pushes against restraints.  They had a room full of Mark Rothko's.  Again, I know that the literal minded just don't get this stuff.  That's not a put-down, but an observation on how our brains work differently - partly by genetics and partly by training.  Fortunately, I had a father who took me to all sorts of art exhibits as I was growing up.


Here are two Rothko's and a gallery visitor.













And here is the one on the right close up.  You can tell I haven't captured the colors quite right.  The one below is, I believe, more accurate.  I can get lost in these paintings, particularly when I'm looking at part of one up-close like this.  Read the explanation below if you're not convinced.

I know some people are scratching their heads about this. "His four year old could do this."  So I'm adding the description to it.

For visually impaired readers, I'll send you a text version of this if you email me. (Right hand column above Blog Archive.)




















My granddaughter did find these two photographs of interest.  They're by Charles Ray and are called the plank pieces.   I asked if we should try that when we got home and she emphatically said "No!"

The Tate Gallery has a lengthy explanation of these two paintings.  Part of me says that one should just look and think about what one sees.  But often we just don't know enough about what the artist was thinking or the context of the times, so reading about a work helps us appreciate it.  Here are some excerpts from the Tate article.

"Ray created the work using his own body, experimenting with the ways in which he could balance himself against the wall using a single plank of wood. The critic Michael Fried has noted that ‘both arrangements, it seems clear, could have been achieved only with the help of at least one other person, who, however, does not appear in the photographs.’ (Fried 2011, p.72.) Indeed Ray deliberately presents the arrangements of body and plank as completed structures, offering no evidence of how the artist arrived in these poses. The works were created while Ray was still a student at the University of Iowa (1971–5) where he studied under Roland Brenner, a former student of the sculptor Anthony Caro. Studying Caro’s work and sculptural techniques (such as welding and bolting metal) was a formative experience for Ray, as the artist recorded in an interview: ‘Caro’s work was like a template; I saw it as almost platonic.’ (Charles Ray and Michael Fried, ‘Early One Morning’, Tate Etc., no.3, Spring 2005, p.51.) 

While a student, however, Ray also became interested in the work of minimalist sculptors such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Richard Serra. In works such as Shovel Plate Prop 1969 (Tate T01728) Serra had used balance alone to support a heavy sculptural structure. This carefully judged equilibrium is seemingly precarious, pressing the sculpture into a charged and potentially dangerous relationship with the viewer. In response to such works, Ray began to experiment with balance and tension in his own sculpture, dispensing with the bolts and welding he had adopted through studying the work of Caro. In doing so Ray erased distinctions between sculpture and body. As he has said of Plank Piece: ‘My body is a sculptural element pinned to the wall by a wood plank.’ (Quoted in Nittive and Ferguson 1994, p.30.)"

It's getting late, so I'll stop here.  I'll add more in part 2.

Graham v MOA #4: Some Media Coverage, Finally

Casey Grove reported about the trial on APRN (it's dated 12/19/17 online).  His piece begins:

"The municipality of Anchorage has paid one of its firefighters more than three-quarters of a million dollars after his successful lawsuit against the fire department. 

It’s the second large civil award this year the municipality has paid to a public safety employee, after two police officers won $2.7 million last summer in a lawsuit over racial discrimination."

The dollar amount is different from what I reported back in August because Casey has added in the lawyers fees while I only had what the jury awarded Graham at the end of the trial.

It's been frustrating that, besides this blog, I'm unaware of any other media coverage of the case aside from this report and an earlier one by Casey back in April.  Obviously the MOA is happy that this is not covered and Graham's attorney doesn't feel it is professional to seek out publicity.  I've followed his lead here.

That said, I'd note that Casey learned about the case from me last April at the Alaska Press Club conference.  Casey had given an interesting talk on covering court cases which included different ways to get information on cases.  Afterward I mentioned one he hadn't mentioned - depositions.  Jeff Jarvi (Graham's attorney) had told me that depositions were open to the public.  The only problem was that the public doesn't have any way of knowing when they are held and who is being deposed.  I didn't know that before this case.  Casey asked how I knew this and I told him I was involved in a case, then asked me about the case I was involved in and I reluctantly told him. He looked it up and called the attorneys for both sides.  Jeff Jarvi questioned Casey about how he found out about the case, and like a good reporter, Casey said he couldn't divulge his sources.  I know that because attorney Jarvi told me about Casey's call and asked me if I had been Casey's source.

So why am I telling you this?   First, I think people should know about how the media work.  I didn't intend to tell Casey about the case, but as he pressed, I had no reason not to tell him the name of the case.
Second, and more importantly, is that this case was below the radar of Anchorage media. Even though it ended in the jury finding for the firefighter to the tune of $660,000.  And as Casey reports it was the second major case the MOA lost in 2017 - the first one involved the police department.

How many other stories are we missing?  This was a case where the jury, after three weeks of trial, found that the Municipality of Anchorage had breached its contractural duties of good faith and fair treatment.  That's a pretty big deal in my opinion.  And if it had been settled back in 2012 when Graham initially complained to the department of the unfairness, it could have easily been handled internally.  And, as I hope to explain in this series of posts, this was not simply about Jeff Graham. He was one of the few foolhardy enough or stubborn enough or mistreated enough  to stand up to the, yes, good old boy system in the fire department.

My Reaction To The Story Itself

It's hard to cover a lengthy trial that you didn't attend.  I salute Casey for making the effort.  You can read, or listen to the whole story yourself, but I did want to pull out this quote from  Anchorage Fire Department Deputy Chief Jodie Hettrick:

“It was a little frustrating for our side not to know exactly what they [the jury] felt that we did wrong,” Hettrick said. “Because we want to treat our employees fairly and equally and make sure that they don’t feel the department is doing something wrong. We want to fix things. It’s just hard to do that when you don’t have all the details.”
Hettrick said the oral exams are very similar to a job interview for any employer, and the fire department uses a scoring system for each question.

This is more than a little disingenuous.  It's the jury's job to determine the verdict.  In this case the jury wasn't asked if the MOA was "guilty" or "not guilty."  Instead, the jury had a series of yes/no questions that were finally agreed on by the two attorneys with the judge, as best as I can tell, being the final arbiter of what the jury instructions would be.  It isn't the jury's job to tell the MOA how Jeff Graham was mistreated.  It was their job to answer those yes/no questions.  And to calculate a monetary remedy.

I wish Casey had asked her if she had contacted any of the jurors to ask them.

Jeff Graham's attorney outlined in great detail how Graham was mistreated and what specific problems existed with the testing during the trial.  At least as much as he was allowed by the MOA's attorney's objections and the judge's sustaining the objections.  Deputy Chief Hettrick sat through the whole trial.  So if she doesn't know what the problems were, that, in itself, is a problem.

I will spell all that out in detail once again in these posts as best as I can - particularly concerning the highly subjective oral exams.  I will go through them in more detail than most people want to hear I'm sure.

A lot of it is technical and at first blush might not seem problematic, except to someone who has been trained in testing.  Unfortunately, the people in charge of testing (and the training for the tests) did not have the state certification that would have qualified them to designed the training and created the tests.  They had Fire Safety Instructor Training Certificate Level I.  (This includes now Deputy Chief Hettrick who was in charge of Training overall in the Fire Department at the time.  Though in her defense, she'd only just been hired.)  Level I certifies you as qualified to give training and exams that were designed by someone else.  Someone who had a Fire Safety Instructor Training Certificate Level II.  Hettrick defended this lack of proper certification by saying that there was no law in Anchorage that required it.  That doesn't change the fact that these folks didn't have the training which would certify their ability to create a training program and develop promotion tests.

I've concluded that these posts will have a lot of repetition and that isn't a bad thing.  It takes awhile to have enough context for specific facts to gain significance, like the training certificate levels.

Then And Now The Rich Use Their Power To Change The Laws To Further Enrich Themselves To the Detriment of Everyone Else And Nature

From The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf's biography of Alexander Von Humboldt:

"In the Political Essay of New Spain Humboldt had doggedly woven together his observations of geography, plants, conflicts of race and Spanish exploits with the environmental consequences of colonial rule and labour conditions in manufacturing, mines and agriculture.  He provide information about revenues and military defense, about roads and ports, and he included table upon table of data ranging from silver production in mines to agricultural yields, as well as total amounts of imports and exports to and from the different colonies.
The volumes made several points very clear:  colonialism was disastrous for people and the environment;  colonial society was based on inequality;  the indigenous people were neither barbaric nor savages, and the colonists were as capable of scientific discoveries, art and craftsmanship as the Europeans;  and the future of South America was based on subsistence farming and not on monoculture or mining.  Though found on the Vieroyalty of New Sapin, Humboldt always compared his data with that from Europe, the United States and the other Spanish colonies in South America.  Just as he had looked at plants in the context of a wider world and with a focus on revealing global patterns, he now conceded colonialism, slavery and economics.  The Political Essay of New Spain was neither a travel narrative nor an evocation of marvelous landscapes, but a handbook of facts, hard data and numbers.  It was so detailed and overwhelmingly meticulous that the English translator wrote in the preface to the English edition that the book tended to 'fatigue the attention of the reader'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Humboldt choose another traitor for his later publications."

This is early 1800s.

And yes, the Humboldt that the current is named after.

[An earlier post on The Invention of Nature is here.]

Graham v. MOA #3: Following The Merit Principles In The MOA Charter Could Have Prevented All This

[This is post #3 of a series on Graham v MOA.  You can get an overview and index of all the posts here. Or just go to the Graham v. Municipality of Anchorage tab up above.]

Understanding the merit system and how to measure people's skills for a job are important to understanding why this case is important.  So I beg your indulgence here.  I've tried to make this pretty easy to digest.

Briefly, before the Merit System (and principles) governments were run on the spoils system - you got a government job if you helped get a candidate elected.  Loyalty, not skill and public spirit, were the key job qualification.  Merit principles don't guarantee fair hiring and promotion, but they go a long way in that direction.

Below is excerpted from the expert witness report I wrote up October 2016.  The judge did not allow the plaintiff to use the MOA (Municipality of Anchorage) charter because he said the promotion process is part of the collective bargaining agreement.  Collective bargaining agreements are approved (on the MOA side) by the Assembly.  But the Charter can only be amended by a vote of the people of Anchorage.  So I still don't understand how the contract would trump the Charter.  But I'm not a lawyer.

Here's from my report:

Background and Purpose of Merit Principles and Systems  

Race and age bias, in the context of promotion of a public employee, is an important issue. But the bigger issue is merit system principles.  Modern human resources departments in reasonably sized organizations both public and private use what is known as a merit system.  The system stems from the 19th Century when governmental structures were evolving from feudal systems based on loyalty to the ruler, to more modern ones, based on rationality.  Scholar Max Weber noted that a new form of organization was emerging which he called a bureaucracy, that was based on rational rules rather than the arbitrary decisions of a ruler.
The point was that organizations that hired people based on their ability to do specific jobs and not on their relationship and loyalty to the ruler were more effective, more efficient, and more permanent.
These ideas of selecting the best person for the job were also promoted in the factory in the early 20th Century by Frederick Taylor and his idea of Scientific Management became widely adopted.  Over time, the ideas underlying Weber and Taylor - the idea that rational, scientific analysis can be applied to management - took hold in private companies.  Applicants would be evaluated by their qualifications to hold their jobs, though personal connections and other biases still were a factor.
In government the change took place both on the federal level  and state and local levels.  In 1883, the Pendleton Act established the US Civil Service after President Garfield was shot by a disgruntled job seeker.  It only applied to a small percentage of jobs at first, but over the years, it has come to cover most federal positions in the career civil service.
On the local level, reformists pushed for merit systems as a way to combat the big city political machines like Tammany Hall that recruited immigrants into their political party with promises of government jobs, as they arrived in the US from Europe.
So, both in government and in the private sector these ideas of rational rules to develop a competent workforce took hold.  But the biases of the times often got written into the rules.  Job tests were written so that new immigrants wouldn’t pass.  Women were assumed ineligible for most jobs and fired from those they could take - like teacher - if they got married.  The societal structure which kept people of color in segregated housing, deficient schools, in poverty, prevented most people of color from getting the needed qualifications, or even from knowing about job openings.  And overt racism prevented those who could qualify from being hired in most cases.
The civil rights movement changed that.  Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregated schools.  This was supposed to lead to African-Americans (particularly) getting better high school educations, then into universities, and then into good jobs.  But many communities opposed busing and set up all-white private schools, leaving the public schools for African-Americans and the poor.
The Voting Rights Act was intended to prevent laws that kept Blacks from voting.  Griggs v. Duke Power was a groundbreaking case in terms of job discrimination.  Black workers traditionally got the lowest level jobs and got paid less than white workers.  When they were required to put in tests for employees seeking supervisory positions, Duke Power created tests that were unrelated to the position and intended to keep blacks from passing. The Supreme Court struck this down saying that the tests for the jobs had to be related to the work that would be done.  They also said that the plaintiffs didn’t have to prove intentional discrimination, only that the test had a disparate impact on the minority candidates.
The merit system was an outgrowth of science being applied to management to ensure more qualified employees got hired.  Businesses developed measures that focused on someone’s ability to successfully do the job.  The civil rights movement fit perfectly into this theoretical ideal.  Job requirements should focus on qualifications, not race or gender.  Griggs v. Duke Power drew back the curtain on the hidden biases that were blocking access to better employment for women and minorities.
Today we’ve come a long way, but we are still a society that sees minority actors in movie roles as criminals or maids or chauffeurs much more than as doctors or lawyers or accountants.  Many people still cringe at the idea of their daughter marrying someone of a different race or religion.  When those feelings spill over into the workplace, into hiring, it’s illegal discrimination.
Unconscious racial bias perpetuates discrimination through assumptions about people based on their race or other characteristics.  Conscious bias attempts to set up barriers that seem legitimate, but are actually intended to keep out undesired applicants.
The merit system is one of the best ways to thwart discrimination so that the most qualified candidates, not the most ‘like us’ candidates, get hired.  It’s the best antidote we have to cronyism, racism, and other forms of discrimination in hiring and promoting employees.

Merit Principles and Systems at Municipality of Anchorage 

The MOA Charter at Section 5.06(c) mandates the Anchorage Assembly to adopt “Personnel policy and rules preserving the merit principle of employment.”   AMC 3.30.041 and 3.30.044 explain examination types, content, and procedures consistent with these merit principles.
Âs defined in the Anchorage Municipal Code Personnel Policies and Rules, “Examination means objective evaluation of skills, experience, education and other characteristics demonstrating the ability of a person to perform the duties required of a class or position.” (AMC 3.30.005)
According to the Firefighters collective bargaining agreement, the conduct and administration of the Anchorage Fire Department, including selection and promotion of employees, are retained by the Municipality. (IAFF-MOA CBA Section 3.1)

Application of Merit Principles to Making And Evaluating Objective Examinations 

In practice, the term merit principles means using procedures that ensure that decisions are made rationally to select and promote those people who are most suited for a job.  They mean that organizations do their best to identify the factors that best predict which applicant is most likely to succeed in the position.  Factors that are irrelevant to someone’s success on the job should not be part of the process.
A test (or examination as used by the MOA) is any process used to evaluate an applicant’s suitability for a position.  An application form can be thought of as a test to the extent that information is used to distinguish between applicants who qualify and those who do not.  A written exam, a practical exam, an interview are all tests when it comes to activities like selection and promotion.
Two basic factors are important when evaluating tests used in personnel decisions.  First, is the test valid?  Second, is the test reliable?
Validity means that the test, in fact, tests what it is supposed to test.  In employment that generally means it is useful in separating those applicants most likely to do well in the position from those less likely to do well.  For example, if a college degree is required for a position, but those without college degrees do was well as those with a degree, then that is not a valid factor to consider, because it doesn’t predict success on the job.  It is common to give applicants a written or practical test or an interview.  These are scored and applicants with higher scores are selected over people with lower scores.
Such tests are valid only if it is true that people with higher scores are more likely to be successful in the position than those with lower scores.  That is, people with higher scores are more likely to do well AND people with lower scores are more likely to do poorly.  If that is not the case, the test is not valid.

Employment tests can be validated by checking scores against actual performance of employees, though this does require selecting employees with low scores as well as with high scores to determine if the lower scoring employees really do perform poorly compared to the higher scoring employees.  This can be expensive and many organizations use ‘common sense.’  But common sense may not be accurate and if an employer is accused of discrimination, they will have to defend the validity of the test.
For rare, specialized positions, validation is difficult to do.  For common positions that are similar across the nation, such as fire fighters, there are often companies that prepare, validate, and sell, and even administer employment tests.
Reliability means that the way a test is administered is consistent.  The same applicant, taking the test at different times or locations or with different testers, would have basically the same result every time.  When people take the college entrance exams, for instance, the conditions are standardized.  No matter where someone takes the test, they get exactly the same instructions, the physical conditions of the test room are within certain parameters (desk size, temperature, noise level, etc.) and they all have exactly the same amount of time to complete the exam.  The scoring of the exams is also the same for everyone.
To ensure reliability of the test taking, all conditions that could affect the outcome must be the same.  To ensure reliability of scoring, the way points are calculated must be as objective and measurable as possible.  Often tests are designed with scales that help a rater know how to give points or how to put applicants in the correct category.
At the most basic level you might just have a scale of 1 - 5 for instance, with ‘good’ at one end and ‘poor’ at the other end.  But how does the rater determine what’s good or bad?
Better would be to have a more objective descriptor such as “successfully completed task with no errors” on one end and “failed to complete the task” at the other end.  Even better would be to have descriptors for each point on the scale.  The more that the descriptor describes an actual objectively testable level of achievement, the more likely it is that different raters would come up with the same score.  For example, ‘meets expectations’ is not as objective as “accomplished the task within 2 minutes with no errors that compromised the outcome.”
Basically, the greater the objectivity of the scoring system, the greater the likelihood of reliability, because there is a clear standard attached to each number in the scale. And with a more objective system, discrepancies can be more easily spotted.  A biased evaluator has a harder job to select favored applicants or disqualify disfavored candidates.  Also, a candidate who was graded unfairly has a better chance of challenging the score.
Another way to increase reliability is to train evaluators on how to use the scoring system.  It is also helpful to have raters who do not have personal relationships with the applicants.
Given the need for validity and reliability, interviews, while frequently used, have been found to be prone to many biases unrelated to the job. There are ways to improve the validity and reliability of interviews.  The questions asked must be clearly tied to ability to be successful in the position, recognizing that being able to perform a task is not the same as being able to describe how one would perform a task.  If personality and speaking ability are not being tested, then interviews can become treacherous employment tests for the applicant and for the employer.  The more subjective a test and the rating system, the easier it is to bias the outcome, whether unintentionally or intentionally.
Since proving intent to discriminate requires overhearing private conversations or emails, this is an impossible hurdle for most applicants.  The courts have recognized this and have allowed ‘impact’ to be used in lieu of intent.  But employment tests can often give us evidence of intent if they are subjective and there is little or no validity or reliability.

Conclusion 

I have seen no materials that offer any information on the validity or reliability of the tests used in the engineer promotional examinations which Jeff Graham has taken.  The exam score sheets I have seen lack rigorous descriptors for raters (or proctors) to calculate scores for applicants and appear extremely subjective.  The materials I’ve seen that were used to train the raters were lacking in detail and substance.
Without evidence to show the exams are valid and reliable, one must assume that the exams do not comply with the Municipality’s mandate to follow merit principles. [Such proof of validation had been requested from but not provide by the MOA.] The point of merit systems is to identify the most qualified candidates for each position and to prevent the introduction of personal biases into their scoring of candidates.  The tests themselves may or may not be discriminatory.  But when they are subjective as the oral board/peer reviews are, biases of the raters are easily introduced into the scoring of candidates. The type of bias could be racial, sexual, age based, or personal depending on the rater.
It is my understanding that MOA has not produced all requested materials and that depositions still remain to be done in this case.  I therefore reserve the right, should additional materials and information become available, to modify or supplement this report.  

Because merit principles were ruled out as the measure the jury would use to evaluate the case, this report was not introduced in court or given to the jury.  However, I was allowed to testify on merit principles in general, but not allowed to relate them to the facts of the case, or even to the MOA.

I was also not allowed to refer to the Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual that the MOA uses which talks about validity in some detail and also talks about 'high stakes' tests - like a promotion test - needing to be professionally prepared and validated.

I was allowed to talk about, again in general terms and not relating what I said to the AFD exams, subjectivity and objectivity.  I acknowledged there is no such thing as 100% objective or subjective, but that there is a continuum from some theoretical total subjectivity to theoretical total objectivity.  The goal of test makers is to have tests as far to the objective side of the continuum as possible.  The more subjective a test, the easier it is to introduce bias, conscious or unconscious.

LA Poster Edged - Comics, Costco Liquor, Burmese Halal, and Skateboards

It seemed like the comic store would like better after a Photoshop poster edge filter was applied.  And then it seemed the whole day would look better that way.  I'd note they had 20-40% off on all the graphic novels.  I'm enjoying The Last Man credited to Brian K. Vaughan, writer; Pia Guerra, penciller; José Marzán, Jr., inker on the cover, and inside Pamela Rambo, colorist, and Clem Roberts, letterer.  I'm sure it will get its own post.




The filter did enhance it the store, but the poster edge filter not obvious in this photo.







Again, it's not obvious to the average person in this shot of a couple of graphic novels.  But look close at the wood and the background.

But you should be able to notice the effect on our lunch at a Burmese/Indian Halal restaurant, called Jasmine, on Sepulveda near Washington.

The Costco liquor department had some eye-popping prices.  Maybe I'm not looking carefully in Anchorage where the liquor department is separate from the rest of the store and I don't usually go in.  In this Costco it's right in the middle of everything else.



















And this Saturday afternoon's shot at the Venice Beach Skateboard Park also seemed to be begging to be poster edged.


[As you can tell, I'm avoiding more current event posts for a bit.  Not because I don't think they're important and not because I don't feel strongly about the issues.  But it takes time to say something that everyone else isn't saying and that is also useful.  Like how to at least make Lisa Murkowski feel a tinge of guilt as she votes for the 500 plus page so called tax reform bill that she and others really won't read first that surely includes all sorts of hidden gifts and thefts will only learn about later.  Though reporters say things like "most people will get a tax cut until the middle income tax cuts expire in five years,"  what they don't say is that other costs - health care, child care, insurance, and countless other necessities - will go up and people will pay more on those things than they will gain in their tax cuts.]

Animals In Kid Land Versus In The Real World

Jon Mooallem's introduction to "Wild Ones" caught me off guard:

"My daughter's world, like the world of most American four-year-olds, has overflowed with wild animals since it first came into focus:  lionesses puffins, hippos, bison,

sparrows, rabbits, narwhals, and wolves.  They are plush and whittled.  Knitted, batik, and bean-stuffed.  Appliquéd on onesies and embroidered into the ankles of her socks.
I don't remember buying most of them.  It feels as if they just appeared - like some Carnival Cruise Lines-esque Ark had docked outside our apartment and this wave of gaudy, grinning tourists came ashore.  Before long, they were foraging on the page of every bedtime story, and my daughter was sleeping in polar bear pajamas under a butterfly mobile with a downy snow owl clutched to her chin.  Her comb handle was a fish.  Her too brush handle was a whale.  She cut her first tooth on a rubber giraffe.
Our world is different, zoologically speaking - less straightforward and more grisly.  We are living in the eye of a great storm of extinction, on a planet hemorrhaging living things so fast that half of its nine million species could be gone by the end of the century.  At my place, the teddy bears and giggling penguins kept coming.  But I didn't realize the lengths to which humankind now has to go to keep some semblance of actual wildlife in the world."

He then goes on to discuss how far people have gone to help salmon swim up their blocked rivers, and how volunteers help seat turtle hatchlings safely into the sea, and giving plague vaccine to ferrets.

I've watched the menagerie that surrounds my granddaughter's every move, but I really hadn't come to the realization that it may be blinding us to the disappearance of real animals.  Food for thought.