Why l Live Here - Bears On Campus

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

Dear Anchorage Campus Community:

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

Twofer: Racist Rant and Consequences of Leaving Kid Alone In Car

Two posts I saw the other day are still stuck in my head.  They also help illuminate the Bergdahl Rohrschach post I did the other day that suggested that many news events are like Rohrschach tests:  what people see in the event - particularly when details are scarce - reflects more about the commenter than about the event.

Here are two more events.

1.    From Salon.

 The day I left my son in the car

I made a split-second decision to run into the store. I had no idea it would consume the next years of my life

Author Kim Brooks recounts in great detail how a series of events  resulted in her running into the store to get one item while her four year old son waited in the car with an iPad.  She cracked the windows, it was 50˚F (10˚C) outside, and she put on the car alarm.  Unbeknownst (that is a strange word, isn't it?) to her, a stranger videotaped her and the kid and her return and called the police to report her.  Kim left before the cops arrived and flew home to another city, but when her husband picked her up at the airport he told her to call her mom, whom she'd been visiting and whose car she was in.

It's a long, long, long piece, but pretty gripping.  It raised a lot of issues, but to me (my Rohrschach) it was about common sense, child danger and independence, and about people judging others.  What I really wanted to know about and what wasn't covered, was the person who reported her.  What was that person's back story?  What caused that person to do what she did?  As one of the commenters at Salon wrote - a true good Samaritan would have stayed by the car and made sure the kid was ok.  Is this a person who is fixated on rules to the extent that she can't discriminate between child neglect and a quick and reasonable dash into the store?  Does she have her own tales of childhood neglect and abuse that justify this in her mind?  We only hear what happened from the view of the writer.  Perhaps there was more incriminating behavior she left out.  The whole Salon piece is here.

A gripping read for anyone, particularly a parent in today's overprotected world. (I write that as someone who walked about a mile to school alone starting in first grade.)  This also reminds me of a story of a close friend who was charged with shoplifting at Whole Foods and spent a year and a big chunk of money to get it dismissed.  This should have never happened; there were some cross-cultural miscues, but common sense did not prevail until the judge finally tossed it.  That's a story I haven't written about here.  Maybe one day I will.  It seems security guards at Whole Foods have done this more than once, for example here, 


2.  Black guy video tapes racist rant from his car.

I don't even feel like putting up the video, but here's the link.  It already has 9 million hits and 35,000 comments.  I bet someone could do a doctoral thesis just on the comments.  Two people see each other out of context of their whole lives.  I'm more interested in what was going on in her head. 

In a follow up on USA Today, she says she's working with her doctor and was changing medications and she apologized, though it seemed more something she was doing as therapy or on advice of an attorney than from her heart.  The guy who posted the video wrote:

"This happened to me last Friday May 30th 2014.  I'm more upset that it was done in front of her children.  They will have hate and have no idea where it came from."

I think the number of hits and comments speaks to how unusual it is to actually capture something like this on camera.   I think the man handled things pretty calmly, all things considered.  The woman was way out of normal range of behavior and I'd be inclined, at this point, to accept her explanation that she was off her meds.  Is this more about racism or more about mental health?  When someone is in her condition and really out of control, I suspect they use whatever they think will push the other person's buttons.  But I'd like to think that even if my brain's normal constraints stopped working, I wouldn't throw 'nigger' at anyone.  But those of us who are products of US culture have that word stashed away in our brains.  Who's to say it wouldn't slip out of any of our lips in a time of stress and mental unbalance?  We only know when we're tested.

Only the people who know her well know whether this was exceptional behavior. 

Lots to think about. 

Brat Wins In Virginia With 8% of Registered Voters. Will Cantor Pull A Murkowski?

[Nov. 7, 2014 - results of the general election here.]

By now, anyone reading this, unless they're in South Africa, knows that Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor lost his primary election Tuesday June 10 to David Brat. 

I'm writing this from Alaska and I don't know much about Cantor's district.  I did drive once from DC to Richmond which would have had me driving through a good part of the population center.  But I'm just gathering internet available data as I try to figure out what happened and what it might mean for his district in November and what it might mean here in Alaska. 

Here are the official election results from the Virginia State Government page:

As you can see, there were 65,008 votes cast.  (I don't know about absentee, but this is 100% of the votes cast Tuesday, apparently.)

So, what percent of registered voters in this district is that? 

From Virginia State Board of Elections website has a February 1, 2014 report on the number of registered voters in District 7.

Virginia District 7	2/1/2014
#of Precincts in District	234
# of Active Voters:	473,032
# of Inactive Voters	31,863
# of Total Voters	504,895

I'm sure that somewhere they have this information broken down by party, but I didn't find it and it's not important enough to spend too much time on.  And it was an open primary without much happening in the other races.   I'm just trying to get some ballpark idea of what happened.

If we take the active voters (473,032) in the district, then about  14% of the registered voters in the district participated.  And about 8% of the district's registered voters, voted for David Brat. 

For Cantor, the obvious deficiency was not getting his voters out.  Given the tone of the coverage of this race - "In an enormous political upset . . " for example - Cantor's supporters figured they didn't have to go to the polls.


Nathaniel Downes at Addicting Information attributes the loss to gerrymandering:

"The cause for this major upset boils down to the GOP’s overuse of gerrymandering. By carving out safe districts for their candidates in the general elections, the Republicans engineered a situation whereby fringe candidates within their own party now can cause primary challenges which can not only force out incumbents, it can enable for candidates who would do damage to the nation through their anti-government rhetoric to win seats in government."

The district did change in 2013 - since Cantor's last race - and it seems to have acquired a leg, so to speak, but probably overlaps the old district quite a bit.  But Downes' point is that it's more Republican than it was, not that there are different constituents.  Here are what I found as the old and new district borders:

District 7 Before 2013 Redistricting

Virginia District 7 after 2013

 

What about the Democrat?   They really weren't expecting to be players in November it seems.   The Downes (the guy at Addicting Info) writes:

"The original Democratic candidate for the district, Mike Dickenson failed to file the paperwork necessary to be on the ballot, although there has been some push for a write-in campaign. So, it looks like the field for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District is going to be dominated by the Tea Party and Libertarian candidates this year.
*UPDATE* It turns out that the Democratic Party of Virginia has pushed forward a candidate late yesterday, Jack Trammell. Like Dave Brat, he is a professor at Randolph-Macon College, and has not yet even gotten his campaign website up and running yet. For now it redirects to ActBlue, the Democratic PAC focused on internet fundraising."

Well, there's more than Democrats. Ballotopedia says:

"Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, will face Democrat Jack Trammell, who is also a Randolph-Macon professor, Libertarian James Carr and write-in candidate Mike Dickinson, who failed to earn the Democratic endorsement."

So, if all that is correct,

• the Republicans have a Tea-Party candidate, David Brat, who upset the House Republican Majority leader, Cantor 
• there's a Libertarian candidate, James Carr, who presumably would eat into Brat's votes
• a last minute Democrat, Jack Trammel, a fellow faculty member at Randolph-Macon College with David Brat which gives new meaning to "campus politics'
• a write-in candidate who failed to file as a Democrat, Mike Dickenson

Will Cantor Pull a Murkowski?

In Alaska, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost the primary in 2010 to Joe Miller, there was a little known Democrat on the ballot to oppose Miller.  Murkowski was able to rally the economic resources of the Alaska Native corporations, and sufficient Democrats voted for her on the grounds that Scott McAdams, the Democrat, couldn't win, and Murkowski was far better than Miller.  She also got lots of Republican votes though official national Republican money stuck with the primary winner.

I don't know enough about Virginia's district 7 to be able to have a clue what might happen if Cantor decided to fight for his seat back.  Given that Brat won with only 8% of the registered voters, and given the Murkowski precedent, I'm sure it will be tempting.


What Does This Mean For Alaska?

My guess is that Joe Miller is a happy man tonight and that his Tea Party supporters will be energized.  The thought that Brat was outspent by Cantor almost  50 - 1, will motivate supporters of a lot of financially marginal candidates.

But Virginia's 7th Congressional district is only about 100 miles long and not nearly as wide.  You can drive to any house in the district in a day at most.  Campaigning in Alaska is much more expensive.  We have state house districts bigger than the whole state of Virginia.   And many villages aren't on the road system.  Hell, our state capital isn't on the road system (but you can get there by ferry.)  Unless you have a pilot's license or a friend who does, getting around the state is very expensive.  

I suspect that the coalition that elected Murkowski will reelect Begich in the end, especially if Miller is the Republican candidate again.  The big national conservative money is pushing relatively recent Alaska Dan Sullivan in the US Senate race, but Begich is a tenacious and savvy campaigner. 

Wielechowski/French Challenge Governor; Plastic Gyre and Kobuk at Museum - Preview Post

I rode through the light drizzle this morning to check on the press conference being held by Rep. Bill Wielechowski and Sen. Hollis French challenging the governor to stand by his claims.  It was scheduled at the Legislative Information Office which doesn't have any walls at the moment.  I thought that would make an interesting backdrop and I needed to get on my bike and get some exercise.

In this post I'll just give a preview of future posts.

Here are the two legislators at their red oil barrel.  Basically, they said the governor has been pushing SB 21 as legislation that would increase oil production and state revenues compared to the previous tax structure ACES.

Sen. French and Rep. Wielechowski showed in the charts the governor's own agencies' predictions that production and revenue will go down.

They challenged the governor to call a legislative session to pass legislation that says, "If by 2018, SB 21 does not increase oil production by 1 barrel or increase revenue by $1, then ACES would be applied to oil companies retroactively."

I'll put up more details and some video later.

Since the rain had gotten a little more serious by the time I got out of the meeting, I decided to stop at the museum and give it a chance to lighten up a bit.  I'd been wanting to see the GYRE exhibit - about the plastic continents floating in the Pacific - anyway.

WOW!  Everyone should go.  I'll put up more, but here's sneak peek.

 Scientific information of the GYRE is there, but the key is that artists have been invited to do pieces to help bring this issue home.


This "Present From The Pacific"is part of a much bigger piece by Steve McPherson.  I chose the lego pieces to highlight because it  should resonate with most people.  These are items found in the sea or washed up on beaches, packaged into gifts.



This exhibit will be here for the summer - then it travels the world.  We're the first city to see it.  Take the kids.  Don't put it off until September, you might want to go back.

And, of course, this does relate to the press conference I'd just been at, because . . .


. . .well of course, the vast majority of today's plastic comes from petroleum.

I'll have to go back and see if the museum made that connection.  I didn't see it there.

Another exhibit I almost missed because it's all by itself on the top floor is a series of photos of the Kobuk sand dunes and some explanation of how scientists today are studying the dunes to get clues about the sand dunes of Mars.

Kobuk Sand Dunes from photo at Anchorage Museum

And then I got back on my bike in something a little more than a drizzle and made my way to the bike trail which is so incredibly beautiful now, even in the rain.  Flowing down the green trail on my bike seems to cleanse me of the detritus of civilization (like the plastic gyre).

Cartoon Imitating Life

Well, that's what the best cartoons do - make us see ourselves.  But this one is pretty specific.  Last month I posted about a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  In the post I wrote: 

"[Our friends] wanted to see the Ansel Adams exhibit.  When I asked one of the guards about the photography policy, he said, no photography in the photography exhibitions."

So I was doubly amused when I saw today's BLISS cartoon in the Anchorage Daily News this morning.

I had plenty of head shots in my Getty post so I didn't post my photo of the top of the Ansel Adams poster outside the gallery.  But here it is now.

Did Bliss visit the Getty too?  Or another Ansel Adams exhibit?

The Bainbridge Island Museum  didn't object to my camera at their Ansel Adams exhibit of his photos of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar.   I posted a few here.

I hope Harry Bliss doesn't mind his cartoon here.  It is my photo of my local newspaper and I left it a little out of focus.  And I've linked to Bliss' website.   And he was making fun of the museum not allowing photos. And I made his exact punchline on my blog a couple of weeks ago. [I'm writing all this because I am aware that a cartoon is the equivalent of a whole article or a whole book and I generally don't post other people's cartoons without their permission.  This is more than just a repost of his cartoon.]

Maybe the Getty can buy a copy and put it up in their Ansel Adams exhibit gallery.  

The Bergdahl Rorhschach Test

[Lots of  people leave a movie before the credits are over.  And sometimes the director saves some great stuff for the end of the credits.  This is a post that has some related, but only in a very tangential way, content at the end.  But I think it's worth waiting for.]

[UPDATE June 9, 2014 Anchorage Daily News reporter Rich Mauer offers more detail to the Bergdahl Rohrschach with his interview with four Anchorage soldier's in Bergdahl's unit today.]

Original Rohrschach image from here, but see notes below*

The commentary on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl reminds me a lot of a Rohrshach test.  In a Rorschach:

[t]he underlying assumption is that an individual will class external stimuli based on person-specific perceptual sets, and including needs, base motives, conflicts, and that this clustering process is representative of the process used in real-life situations.^[33] [From Wikipedia]

And we see all sorts of folks 'seeing' in Bergdahl (the external stimulus) radically different things, based, I'm assuming, on those  "person-specific perceptual sets, and including needs, base motives, conflicts."


Some of the things people see in the Bergdahl Rohrschach:

• Traitor
• Confused Young Man
• Sane Young Man Who Reacted To The Insanity Of War
• Means To Trash The President
• Republicans Acting Bad Once More
• Chance To Empty Guantanamo
• US Commitment To Recover all POWs
• Negotiating With Terrorists
• Innocent Until Proven Guilty
• All Our Soldiers Are Hereos

The traditional Rohrschach Test has very specific techniques for interpreting people's responses.  There are different methods:  The Exner method and the Rohrschach Performance Assessment System seem to be the two major ones.   Wikipedia goes through the basic inkblots and standard interpretations.  And there's even a section on conflicts among the testers over interpretation.

Frustrated with people's seemingly mindless interpretation of current events?  Think of the current event as a sort of Rohrschach test. 

In looking at Rohrschahs,  psychologists looks at more than just what the testers 'see' in the inkblots.  They also look at how they approach the task - for instance, do they take it as given to them or do they ask if they can turn the cards around?  They listen to how the person forms the interpretation.

And we should do the same too.

Everyone's response will be a combination of the respondent's preconceived notions of how the world works and the evidence presented.  The less connected to the facts of the case, the more the response tells us about the respondent than about the case, the more the respondents are projecting their world views, their values, their biases onto the case. 

But none of this is new to most of you reading this. Perhaps for some it's a different metaphor for thinking about this.

The real questions we have to find ways to answer are:

1.   How do we form our 'judgment habits'?  (Yes, they're habits.)  How do we learn to go from evidence to conclusion?   To what extent is this affected by genetics and to what extent by environment? 
2.  How do we learn to balance feelings and rational thinking to improve the likelihood of coming to more accurate assessments?
3.  What causes some of us to short circuit and shut down one side or the other - rationality without any feeling or feeling without any rationality?

I know you can all think of examples of people rationally going through the evidence before they make their conclusions known.   And you know people whose instant conclusion pops out of their mouths as soon as the first tiny bit of (possibly false) evidence is presented.

But sometimes the people that mouth off quickly, loudly, and arrogantly without waiting for all the evidence are right.  And the people who deliberately exam every detail sometimes turn out to be wrong.  A lot goes into 'getting it right' than just these two dimensions. 

There are lots of directions this post could go.  I really wanted to just raise the idea of current events being like Rohrschach inkblots, we learn more about the people talking than about the issue. 

But as I did that, I also started thinking about the wide array of factors that affect good and bad interpretations.  And after barely touching that, I'm already thinking about how we deal with people who aren't rational or who ignore feelings.   But I'm not ready to put all those ingredients together into a satisfying post yet. 
 
So let me conclude this post with a little seriousness and a little silliness.

*Images (the serious part)

I spent a more time on the images (there's one below too) than I did on actually writing.  Like the two here, most images I use here are originals I create.  But if I use someone else's images (even if I alter them as in this post), I like to give credit.  I found the Rohrschach image using google image search.  But my source clearly wasn't the original, but that site didn't cite its source.  Google reverse image search gave me over 500 locations for the image.  I passed on finding the real original site. I  really don't want to link to a site that used an image without giving credit - and I'm not that impressed with the post the image was in. 

Hermann Rohrshach (the silly part) 

When I was looking up the Rohrschach test, I found a picture of Hermann Rohrschach on Wikipedia.  I was surprised at how young and contemporary - and cool - he looked.  According to Wikipedia,

  "in 1921 he wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test."

He was was born in November 1888, so he was probably 38 when the book came out.  In April 1922, again according to Wikipedia:

"he died of  peritonitis, probably resulting from a ruptured appendix.^[9]"

He left a wife and two children, ages five and three.  Below is his picture and the actor it made me think (another Rohrschach like test?) should play him in the movie of his life.

Hermann and Matt

Hermann's picture is the way I found it.  It took a little time to find a picture of Matt Damon in a reasonably similar pose.  Then I changed it to black and white, got rid of the background, shrank it, and added the mustache.   I think they'd seem more alike  if you didn't see the pictures side-by-side.  As I look at the two now, I know that readers will think of other actors who look much more like Hermann. 

Birch Shield Bug Close Up

I used the Photoshop Sketch - Water Paper filter only for the background.  I left the bug and leaf alone.  Except where the edges merged with the background, they're the original photo.

I posted a picture of the birch shield bug in 2011 with a description from Dominque M/ Collet's Insects of south-central Alaska.  Yes, it's really called a bug.  Elasmostethus interstinctus if you want to be formal.

I'm proud of myself.  I didn't look at the computer until 3pm today.  Puttering around in the yard was good. 

If you have an Alaska bug you can't identify, the Cooperative Extension Service has a form you can submit online or in person.

By the way, here's a site that has pictures of a lot of different shield bugs.

Charter College Graduation And Lady In Blue

I have a friend.  I went to his Charter College graduation in 2010, at the Performing Art Center.  Except that after he 'graduated', he was he still had two more classes to take.  Over time that escalated to four and then six classes.  I know this because I went with him several times when he spoke to a counselor and then a higher level administrator.

But he finally got this all completed and we went to graduation again Friday night. 

Here's the President talking to the grads with the faculty in the background. 

Here's a grad getting his diploma.

I'm thinking lots of thoughts, but it's late and I need to go to bed.  It did make me wish the Regents hadn't eliminated the Community College system. 

And the lady in blue.  Well, I took the picture down.  She wore a very short skirt and very high heels walking out of the PAC.  I found myself debating whether I should post the picture or not and decided that if I have a question, I should not post it.  While I took the picture in a public place and you can't see her face, I didn't ask her permission.  I'm still trying to articulate my gut feeling and I can't yet.  

Why I Live Here - Breakfast on the Deck

The best room in the house isn't in the house.  It's our summer extra room - on the deck.  Here's what I saw when I looked at the ceiling while I ate breakfast this morning.

 Here's one of the walls.  














OK, I can see a little more than trees, but it's a bit of wooded paradise on a normal city lot right in the middle of town.  It helps that there's a hill, but otherwise, it's just that no one cut the trees in the back ever.  We too have just left it natural.  And we've added trees on the sides to keep a little green summer oasis in the city.  It's also relatively low maintenance.


And they say it's good for our mental health. 

六四 June 4

Learning the months is one of the few things in Chinese that's easy.  It's simply month 1, month 2, month 3, etc.  Saying dates can get abbreviated to simply the number of the month and the date.

Today is 6-4, Liù Sì  (approximately Leo Si - like sir but without the r sound at the end, and they're both falling tone, the falling tone you'd use when you just remembered you forgot something you need and you say "shit!")

I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989 for a year sabbatical, so this is all very fresh in my mind, even 25 years later.  When we planned a trip with students to Beijing the following spring, we scheduled it so we were back in Hong Kong a couple of weeks before the first anniversary.   Here's a picture of Tiananmen Square in May 1990.

Tiananmen Square May 1990

Someone who did not want to be displayed here was standing right in front.  So I used the rubberstamp function in Photoshop to erase history.  It seemed appropriate because the Chinese government is trying to erase the memory of June 4, 1989.  Note there's a shadow across the bottom of the photo.  I decided that while I took the person out, I'd leave the shadow. 


Louisa Lim has just written a book called The People's Republic of Amnesia.  You can hear her talk about the erasure of this historic day on NPR here.


It just seems necessary to remember today, because in China this day officially does not exist.