Pilot bread gets serious

Pilot bread is practically a staple in the bush, and it's pretty common to offer it to folks along with some coffee when they come by visiting.  It's also quintessential outdoor food for backpackers, hunters, rafters, and so forth, because the stuff is just indestructible. It's also incredibly calorie dense, and something like a 100 and change per cracker. You need a big chunk of club crackers to come close to that many calories (Though, IMO, club crackers are tastier than pilot bread).
Now my idea of a pilot bread recipe involves taking a chunk and either slathering it with mayo (mmm, mayo) or making a tiny pizza out of it. If I'm feeling really creative, I'll crumble it for use in mooseloaf (two eggs. 1/2 milk-like-substance. 2 lbs ground moose. 5ish crumbled biscuits. Garlic powder, parsley, oregano, and basil to taste. Bacon if you got it) or make a salmon casserole (crumbled biscuits, bowtie noodles, a can of cream of mushroom, salmon, and hunks of Velveeta).

These, people, though, take pilot bread way too seriously. Sundaes made from pilot bread? I'm not sure if that's brilliance, or if down that path lay pure madness. The blackened salmon dish sounds very tasty though - I wish ADN would post the actual recipes!

I love the short story at the end, though,

When [Elsie Pavil Mather] was growing up in Kwigillingok, Pilot Bread was one of the few non-Native foods, she wrote. People used to say the crackers first showed up after a shipwreck and villagers, unaware they were edible, tossed them around like a toy.

"Do not play Frisbee with crackers!" wrote Mather, who lives in Anchorage now. "We are supposed to respect all our food."

Alaska Census changes, 2000 to 2010

Data time, people! Behold, tables:

 

Borough or Census area	2000 estimate	2010 estimate	% change
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	6,551	5,588	-14.70%
Ketchikan Gateway Borough	14,070	13,477	-4.21%
Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area	6,146	5,559	-9.55%
Valdez-Cordova Census Area	10,195	9,636	-5.48%
Kodiak Island Borough	13,913	13,592	-2.31%
Bristol Bay Borough	1,258	997	-20.75%
Lake and Peninsula Borough	1,823	1,631	-10.53%
Yakutat City and Borough	808	662	-18.07%
Dillingham Census Area	4,922	4,847	-1.52%
Denali Borough	1,893	1,826	-3.54%
Sitka City and Borough	8,835	8,881	0.52%
Aleutians West Census Area	5,465	5,561	1.76%
Haines Borough	2,392	2,508	4.85%
Nome Census Area	9,196	9,492	3.22%
Northwest Arctic Borough	7,208	7,523	4.37%
Wade Hampton Census Area	7,028	7,459	6.13%
Aleutians East Borough	2,697	3,141	16.46%
Juneau City and Borough	30,711	31,275	1.84%
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	6,174	7,029	13.85%
Bethel Census Area	16,006	17,013	6.29%
North Slope Borough	7,385	9,430	27.69%
Kenai Peninsula Borough	49,691	55,400	11.49%
Fairbanks North Star Borough	82,840	97,581	17.79%
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	59,322	88,995	50.02%
Anchorage Municipality	260,283	291,826	12.12%
Hoonah-Angoon Census Area	3,436	2,150	-14.79%
Skagway Municipality		968
Wrangell City and Borough	6,684	2,369	-21.11%
Petersburg Census Area		3,815
Statewide	626,932	710,231	13.29%

I have the table organized by the number of citizens gained or lost. Note that Hoonah/Skagway and Wrangell/Petersberg is reported differently between 2010 and 2000, so they take up two lines (Only one value in 2000 per either pair). What leaps out at me is most of the change comes from the MatSu - a wopping 50% change in population! Yikes! Fairbanks has also grown at an accelerated rate, but not nearly as much. I was wrong about the North Slope - it has a greater % change than the North West Borough. I was correct about the YK, but too conservative about the rate of growth since both major census districts topped 6% growth. I was too conservative about how horribly hard SE is getting hammered. Aside from Bristol Bay, the biggest percent changes were in SE. The biggest absolute change, though, was in the Yukon-Koyukuk area:

Borough or Census area	Absolute Change	Percent of State Change
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	-963	-1.16%
Ketchikan Gateway Borough	-593	-0.71%
Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area	-587	-0.70%
Valdez-Cordova Census Area	-559	-0.67%
Kodiak Island Borough	-321	-0.39%
Bristol Bay Borough	-261	-0.31%
Lake and Peninsula Borough	-192	-0.23%
Yakutat City and Borough	-146	-0.18%
Dillingham Census Area	-75	-0.09%
Denali Borough	-67	-0.08%
Sitka City and Borough	46	0.06%
Aleutians West Census Area	96	0.12%
Haines Borough	116	0.14%
Nome Census Area	296	0.36%
Northwest Arctic Borough	315	0.38%
Wade Hampton Census Area	431	0.52%
Aleutians East Borough	444	0.53%
Juneau City and Borough	564	0.68%
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	855	1.03%
Bethel Census Area	1,007	1.21%
North Slope Borough	2,045	2.46%
Kenai Peninsula Borough	5,709	6.85%
Fairbanks North Star Borough	14,741	17.70%
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	29,673	35.62%
Anchorage Municipality	31,543	37.87%
Hoonah-Angoon Census Area	-318	-0.38%
Skagway Municipality
Wrangell City and Borough	-500	-0.60%
Petersburg Census Area
Statewide	83,299	n/a

Anchorage had the greatest growth (Gold star for me) followed by MatSu and Fairbanks and the Kenai. Juneau, as I anticipated, remains essentially flat. I might have to double back on the Rural-to-Urban migration idea. There's 214 more rural residents than there were in 2010, which is a minuscule increase. Either there's more immigration than emigration, but elevated death to compensate, or births are higher than deaths, and there's a net emigration. The second scenario seems more likely.

Why didn't this show up in the school enrolment records in Anchorage? Well, it could be that people more likely to move don't have children yet, or maybe they're not all moving to Anchorage. Or, what I think is most likely - there's serious flaws in how we calculate enrolment in schools, where students from the bush are more likely to skip classes (true) and therefore not be reflected in the annual counts. This downward biases the enrolment numbers, and therefore funding, of schools with the students who need the most help.

But, that's navel gazing and guesswork. The real way to address this is to follow individuals, not counts of individuals. Census summaries we have access to can't show that that +1 person in the Kenai came from Juneau as opposed to Kansas. You need to do a more detailed breakdown than that to find those sorts of trends.

Finally, on the diversity front, diversity increased slightly (69% White to 66% White descent) mostly to an additional 1 percent more people of Asian descent, and a grab-bag of other.

There's a lot of information here, and I've barely played around with it. Hopefully, I'll get more time to dig deep into this well of information in the next little bit.

Pictures

The snowshoe hare-coyote-Dall's sheep cycle?

When we teach our students predator-prey relationships, we tend to tell them a very basic story that have come from a few very good studies. It's not that all we have are simple models, but but we like to build up the basics before we dive into the complexities. Because when you get down to the complexities, a lot of counter-intuitive things happen which don't follow "common-sense" relationships.

At the last Alaska chapter of the Wildlife Society meeting, Steve Arthur presented one such study, which I had previously mentioned here by flinging out the abstract. Now the full paper by him and Laura Prugh is out in the Journal of Wildlife Management, and so I want to spend a little more time on the study.

They studied snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) and Dall's sheep (Ovis dalli) in the central portion of the Alaska Range, illustrated by the figure to the right. It's worth noting that though both species are in the Alaska range, they have differing habitat requirements. Whereas hares are happy in the lower foresty areas, the sheep decidedly prefer the rocky hills where they can can try to avoid predators. However, while adult survival among sheep is fairly high, lamb survival is generally lower, as predators (lynx, coyotes, eagles, wolverines) can still prey on them.

They used road-side counts to index hare abundance, which they double checked against pellet count data - it's little things like that which make a good paper. For the sheep end, they collared a variety of ewes and fitted them with collars, as well as lambs. They re-located them about 3-5 times a week, and the collars were fitted with mortality sensors. On death, they went and determined cause of death of the individuals. One nit-pick here - scavenging is probably represented somewhat in the mortality data, but the two authors admit that. Still, you wouldn't expect scavanging and predation to vary independently of mortality, and survival is what they wanted to get at. Finally, they used surveys to index the total population of Dall's sheep through the period.

When they analysed the adult data, they found that the year really didn't have a major effect on their survival, and that survival was either modeled best as age-specific, or just constant. However, for lambs, the best explanations for the changes in survival were either a three year time lag in hare abundance, positively, or a negative relationship between survival and hare abundance with a one year time lag. The mechanism for changing survival appears to be changes in predation - primarily coyote and golden eagle predation. Accidents and disease seem to remain at a constant low-level throughout all years, whereas predation seems to vary among years. Eagles are best predators early on, whereas coyotes appeared to kill several months after ewes dropped their lambs. As I mentioned before, snowshoe hares and sheep share those predators.

This seems to suggest that although there's a positive relationship between abundance of hares and sheep, it is not, in fact, a mutualistic relationship. If they had just limited their study to abundance, they would have never seen the change in lamb survival. At that point, we would be led to incorrectly believe that snowshoe hares and sheep benefit from each-other's presence. It doesn't appear to be mediated by a functional response in predation - first, a previous study found that coyotes don't switch to sheep when they're low, but secondly, it would mean there would be a positive relationship between hare abundance and sheep survival, not negative.

It's a messy story, one that depends on the sort of data you gather, and, this simplified version I'm presenting here is leaving out further complications itself. The effects of predation can be complex, leading to strange results when all is said and done. Here, the population dynamics of Dall's sheep seem at first blush to be driven by a species that isn't even in the same habitat as them. It's only though diligent data collection the true picture comes out.


Arthur, S., & Prugh, L. (2010). Predator-Mediated Indirect Effects of Snowshoe Hares on Dall's Sheep in Alaska Journal of Wildlife Management, 74 (8), 1709-1721 DOI: 10.2193/2009-322


All figures from Arthur & Prugh 2010, used under fair-use rationale. 

Massive duststorms... in Alaska?

When you think of a massive dust storm, if you're like me, you probably don't think about South-East Alaska. I'm more likely to think of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait than Alaska's Banana Belt. And yet, there it is:

That's a photo from NASA. So, what on earth are those massive plumes streaming off the coast from? Give it a guess, and then check out Phil Plait's answer. :) NASA does an awful lot of Earth observing, and generates a whole bunch of critical data. That's not bad for an agency who's entire budget costs us much less than one percent of the federal budget.

Winterize yourself

It's starting to get cold over here, although we haven't really plumbed the sub-zero °Fs yet. But with the days getting shorter, and the temperature going down, winter is definitely here for the season. This much really hit me Saturday when I woke up after sleeping for nearly 12 hours. Don't bother me, I'm hibernating! In that vein, I want to share this surprisingly accurate list of ways to winterize yourself from lifehacker. Just like you winterize your truck, and pull your boat out for the season, you should take good care of yourself, too!

My two cents would be "don't feel the need to hold onto your really warm gear until later." Lots of people are walking around campus in light jackets like they're in denial, and they're clearly shivering. Well that's silly! Just put on your warm stuff when you feel cold. Don't over dress or you'll get hot, but it's the opposite that's the bigger problem.

Also, "Get out an do something!" So many new students here hole up for the coldest months, which is precisely when they should be getting out and being active. Being active helps with the mood, and you also get more sun exposure. Keeping the indoors brightly lit helps too.

This one will be counter intuitive, but "turn down your thermostat." If you keep your home slightly cool, your body will better acclimate to the cold. There's good science to back this up, too. I see tiny cabins with massive woodstoves, and I have to shake my head. Some of them get so hot, you'd think we were in the jungle!

What are your tips for staying winterized?

Moose management - it works, sometimes

Well, I finished reading "Science and Values Influencing Predator Control for Alaska Moose." It was actually a very good read, with excellent cadence, even if I had heard all of this at conferences before. I've got a few general comments on this, but first I'll lay out the review a bit.

It comes in four five.
First, it reviews the relative effects of predation to other factors for moose. After all, if it's mostly nutrition limiting moose, additional rounds of predator control will not bolster moose populations, or will only do so slightly. Their arguments are old-hat to anyone who's been on this ride for a while, but it's worth repeating:

• Most moose in AK are at low density.
• Moose at low density are primarily limited by predation.
• Moose in some areas experience effects from high density.
• Moose in high density areas are not very effected by predation.
• Everyone is effected by random "bad winters" (Winterkill).
• Most moose predation mortality is in juvenile moose.

The second section dealt with manipulative studies - that is to say, our previous experience with Intensive Management. Here there's eight cases laid out that I won't go into exhaustive detail on. The best evidence, by far, is GMU 20A, or the moose south of the Tanana river and north of the Alaska Range. McGrath has potential to be a more important finding, but as of yet it is a weak-moderate finding. I am very unconvinced by data from 20D, but others might consider the data from that unit good. In general, the pattern of predator manipulation (which wasn't always IM) was followed by improved moose censuses. Some of these have thus-far been sustained (20A), others less so (Kenai).

The third, and shortest section, is on sustainability of the increases moose counts. This is the shortest section, since the data is the newest (or in other cases, the weakest). Again, the best data comes from Unit 20A, where there's been a sort of accidental experiment going for a while now. Important factors in the long term-sustainability of these populations seems to be a) carefully monitoring nutritional status b) doing habitat improvement when possible (this includes allowing burns to proceed, or doing controlled burns) c) allowing larger cow moose hunts to keep the population short of carrying capacity (overshooting K is a Bad Thing™).

Next comes the sustainability of wolf and bear populations in interior AK. The evidence for sustainability is very firm, and although I'm sure some people could twist it, in general most people can recognize that the situation is fine. The areas involved are vast, getting people involved in bear harvest is actually very hard, wolves and wolves do an exceptionally good job compensating for high harvest, and IM areas only seem large until you consider how big the state is, and how many and how large non-IM areas are. This is the section from my earlier quote. 

Lastly, there are some general comments on the sociology and public opinions around IM. It discusses logical fallacies employed by both people for and against it, and seems to suggest reconciliation is unlikely because either user group starts with fundamentally different premises and values. I think this is an overly grim view of the situation, and have hope that open communication can bring the public to some sort of consensus. This section had  a great table which I'll repost here.

In general, the message is that "Intensive Management Works*" Where there's a footnote that would read "*Under some models, in some conditions, some of the time." Which I think most biologists would be willing to concede. A large part of the problem over IM is the perception of conflicting values, which is an inherently non-scientific issue. I know that some Scientists would reply that the HD equilibrium is inherently unstable, and it's the LD "dynamic" equilibrium that's the most stable state. I'm not sure there is good ways to argue for or against that right now, without, say, 20 more years of data that doesn't exist.




Okay, here's my thoughts, in no particular order:

Caribou are generally a less-reliable prey than moose because seasonal distribution is more clumped and unpredictable, and voids exist in caribou distribution in inland Alaska.

I agree with the latter part of the sentence, but the former really needs a citation. I can't just let that pass. Where caribou are abundant, they have the potential to be a substantial part of wolf diets, potentially lowering the number of moose. I can illustrate this with a model, but I don't have data to back this up. However, neither do they.


It seems like Winterkill is often ignored as a major factor moose population trajectories. And it's hard to react to stochastic severe winter events fast enough to change management. This is the biggest lesson I take from the Fairbanks winter of 1971 (though I take others as well). We need a better manner of accommodating severe winter events.


Given the invasion of White Tailed and Mule Deer from the Deep South™, should our management objectives change from managing for high density populations to managing for low density? LD populations have two big advantages - first, contact between moose is lower, so disease transmission is reduced. Second, moose are in better nutritional status, which correlates strongly with the ability to mount immune responses to the emerging diseases. On the other hand, LD moose populations have declining recruitment as population declines due to diseases, whereas in HD moose populations, recruitment increases.  I don't know the answer to this question. Science is needed, because CWD and Winter Tick are coming to AK whether we like it or not.


IM for bears could probably be highly refined. Bears are even more cultural than wolves are, and in one instance less than 50% of killed 72% of calves. You could probably get away with just removing, or killing, the better predators. I think we need to start viewing bears as people long-ago did - as human in their cognition. But I'm a big proponent of the idea that bears show strong cultural evolution, so take that with a grain of salt.

Boertje, R., Keech, M., & Paragi, T. (2010). Science and Values Influencing Predator Control for Alaska Moose Management Journal of Wildlife Management, 74 (5), 917-928 DOI: 10.2193/2009-261

Sentences worth pondering

Currently, the primary practical factors ensuring that Alaska predator populations remain sustainable include 1) lack of tradition and interest in harvesting wolves and bears relative to harvesting moose or caribou, and 2) the greater challenge and cost associated with harvesting wolves and bears because predators are elusive, particularly in forested areas, and usually occur at low densities compared with moose or caribou. A substantial, long-term change in ≥1 of these factors will warrant a reexamination of whether sustainability of predator populations is adequately ensured.

This from Science and Values Influencing Predator Control for Alaska Moose Management in the new issue of JWM.

You have the right to not prove your statements?

There's been an article making the rounds at various news sources, and I think it's worth linking here: Are Cameras the New Guns? I very strongly encourage you to read it.

The problem is simple. With cameras being everywhere now, it's becoming easier and easier to record people doing things they shouldn't. People catch pickpockets and shame them on YouTube, or record those teens on their lawn to hand over to the police. No one seems to mind those... But the problem arises when people record the police themselves. You see, people have been using videos to show that, well, not all police officers follow the law. Some of them outright lie about how events transpired, and presumably have been doing so for years. But now, people can show this with video. Naturally, Police don't like this. At all. And they're fighting back to make recording their doings a crime.

Police are like everyone else. It's easy to fall into saccharine sophism and talk about how they're doing their patriotic duty, and all that nonsense, but honestly, police officers are like everyone else. There's many good, and many bad individuals. It's irrational to think that the police force is immune to the same mix of competence and incompetence that other places suffer from. No one denies not all shop clerks are helpful, polite, or will give you a fair deal. Why would we insist that all police are any of those things? Humans are inherently a mix of good, bad and ugly.

But. We shouldn't tolerate the ugly.

Alaska needs a law that says that people can be recorded in places where they don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In your home, you have an expectation of privacy. At work, too. That's fairly reasonable. But it seems unreasonable that making a recording outside on the road would be illegal. After all, nothing prohibits there being a second person there, who would see the whole event. The officer has no expectation of privacy there. The effect, either in recording or having a third party observer, would be the same.

The Death of Fr. Juvenaly

A friend of mine send a link to me. I don't know why he did, but I'm very glad he did because it has a very good account of 1790s history in it. It's about the death of one of Alaska's earliest missionaries, Fr. Juvenaly. Fr. Juvenaly was a Russian orthodox, and moderately old for point in history - remember than amongst Whites in America, half of America was under the age of 16 in 1790. He was, therefore, a bit old to be "gallivanting around" as a missionary. None the less, he apparently came first to the Kenai, then to Kodiak, where he crossed to the Alaska Peninsula/Iliamna area, never to be seen or heard from again. What fate had he met? Was it the Iliamna monster?

[...] Then, about a hundred years later, an American historian, Hubert Bancroft, published an account of Father Juvenaly’s death purportedly based on the priest’s own words as he recorded them in a diary that a man named Ivan Petrov claimed to have found and translated. According to this diary, Father Juvenaly fell into temptation, having been seduced by the daughter of a local Indian chief, and then was hacked to death for refusing to marry her. That is all I knew about this incident until my Yup’ik father-in-law, Adam Andrew, who was born about 1914 in the mountains near the source of the Kwethluk River, decided to tell me the story about “the first priest to come into our region.”

The whole story is wonderful. You can continue reading here.

North From Anchorage

Here's a video from somewhere between 1925 and 1930 that I found online at the Alaskafilmarchives account at youtube.

I really like this account, and think it's a good idea - this opens it up to anyone, not just people in Fairbanks or Anchorage. My one regret is that the films are mostly of white towns and not much otherwise. Still, even though it's poorly representative, it's a good source. It's always interesting to see what it was like before we were alive to see it.

Things that have been on my mind a lot: Mesopreadators.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about is Mesopredators. Mesopredators are medium predators, such as racoons, coyotes, snakes, etc etc. A bear, wolf, puma etc would be a top predator, and not a mesopredator.

See, I was reading a paper recently about Pronghorn in Wyoming, where they had wolf-free and wolf-abundant sites. In their wolf-free sites, fawn (pronghorn have fawns, for some reason) survival was near 0 in some years, whereas in nearby wolf-abundant sites, fawn mortality was very low. They argue that the difference was in mesopredators, who differentially prey on fawns, and they try to show that coyote predation makes up the bulk of the wolf-free mortality. I know how practically difficult it is to make these calls, so I remain dubious of that. Still, it's hard to argue with that kind of finding in survival.

So, does interior AK have mesopreadators of consequence for our game? Coyotes are definitely mesopredators, and wolves generally do a good job keeping their populations surprised in most of the state (Coyotes are recent arrivals). I don't see much of a release when wolves are removed. Perhaps there are other factors limiting coyote release. Lynx can prey on reindeer calves, but do wolves keep lynx suppressed? I have a hard time envisioning this, because they don't have much niche overlap outside of that.

I'm still thinking about this, but I'm not sure mesopredators are a major factor in large game dynamics in non-SE Alaska.

The midnight Rainbow

Hopefully I can get some better pictures before summer comes.

Netgunning deer in New Zealand

I haven't used a netgun before (and annoyingly, I haven't been out on any captures in a bit. Grumble.). Most of my critters are either much easier to access, such as Caribou being accessed at Onion Portage by Unit 23's Area Biologist, or are in situations where netgunning is impractical compared to the other options (e.g., darting moose). But in other areas, it's a very viable and efficient way of doing captures. I know the Canadians rely on netguns and helicopters for a large chunk of their caribou captures.



Last night, I was at a small get-together and we were talking about pilots. We were talking about a guy with 4,000 hours as a helicopter pilot doing capture work. Which is quite a bit. One of the guys there was a pilot at one point, and said he (and most people) bug out before 2,000 hours. It's just too dangerous in most of the places in AK people are called to fly.

AWOL in the interior.

Things are busy. Going to be AWOL for the next few days. Here's a picture of one Alaska's other, other highways: River snowmachine trails. Get on one of those, and I'm not sure there's anywhere you can't end up.

Alaska: Then and Now

Click to enbiggen.
While intellectually I know that Alaska's changed a lot since 1949, it's sometimes hard to realize just how much. I've been looking at old topographical maps, which show Alaska as it was 50-70 years ago, looking at village locations to see what went away, what the surveyors missed, and what popped up since then.  In the YK, the BIA had more effect on where villages ended up than almost anything else - I suspect that might be true on the North Slope, too, but I don't know for sure.

When Goldstream didn't have a road, or anything, I couldn't help but notice this little CDP called "Happy." It's just to the east of Ester Dome. Right now, it's where Sheep Creek Rd. crosses the Goldstream Creek. What happened to Happy? Did they become sad and leave? Right now, there's a small collection of homes there, on the less cheerfully named "Aurora Borealis Drive." Bring back Happy, I say!

There's something else I've noticed, but it isn't on this map I've shown you. When I drove the Parks Highway back in July, I realized that there was an air strip right after you leave the Denali area, when you start getting into the very edge of the Susitna valley, in the Chulitna headwaters. It's called "Summit." It's a very lovely area, and there's a large lake (Edes Lake), and a couple random cabins over there. Oh, and wind turbine. I started wondering what was the story behind Summit - I tried googling it, but I can't find anything.

When I looked at the area in a 1951 topo, even ignoring the highway, Summit looks very different. It had roads going up and down a bit - rare in that area, for that time. And there are a lot of black dots that indicate cabins... more than Cantwell. Even back then it had an Air Strip. What was Summit? I don't see any signs of mining either in person, or on the map. It's a very pretty area, but it's a very inhospitable area. I really want to know what the story behind Summit was.

Edited to add: Looking at these old topos, and just thinking about challenges 110 years ago in general,  I can't help but feel like all of us alive now are frauds. We're not our grandfathers and grandmothers. We have it so easy it's laughable.
On the other hand, I'll trade being a fraud for having a mean life expectancy of twice of 1900s. That's 2x the time to feel like a fraud.

Tightening the belt.

This was in the ADN recently:

A bill proposed by Gov. Sean Parnell would prohibit suspended sentences for Alaskans convicted of human trafficking, possession of child pornography or distribution of indecent materials to minors.

Sigh.  Are we physically incapable of learning from other states? Who does distribution laws and child pornography laws tend to hurt more than anyone else? Teens. There's a hysteria around Sexting, which is using cellphones to send explicit material to girl/boyfriends.
But even if you disagree with the practice, there's no denying that kids end up as sex offenders in other states for these kinds of laws.

Adding 14 yearolds to a sex offender registry for having nude pictures of themselves or their SO is not effective in combatting the real and dangerous problem of domestic abuse in our state. Instead, we're focusing on the much lesser, and generally over-blown (in scope) issue of Child Pornography. And as discussed before, the remainder of the bill isn't going to do much for making a dent in domestic violence because deterrence doesn't work on crimes of passion.


Is anyone else thinking about the latest version of Fell Acres hysteria? Except the law would have us lock up teens instead of grandmoms.

Sigh. It's just frustrating. Parnell should know better, honestly.

The Little Rail-line that couldn't.

I love old stuff. Here's this, published NY Times April 11 1902:

    Tachoma, Washington, April 10. - George S Canfield has arrived from Minneapolis en route to Nome. He announces that when he left New York last week arrangements were underway to consolidate companies incorporated to build 500 miles of railway from either Cook Inlet or Illiamna Bay across Seward Peninsula to Nome. The companies are understood to be the Alaska and Siberia Company, which Canfield assisted in organizing, and the Trans-Atlantic Company of Colorado.
    The Alaska and Siberia Company made surveys between the Yukon River and Nome during the Summers of last and the previous years under Canfield's direction. He believes the consolidated interested will select Illiamna Bay as a coast terminus, building thence to Kaltag, on the Yukon, and thence across the Tundra to Nome. He expects the work of construction will commence this year at each end.

I think Mr Canfield's project is a few decades behind schedule.
I was trying to find the initial financial estimate of the modern proposed route to Nome. Right now, one of the biggest economic impediment to Reindeer herding on the Seward Peninsula is the ability to move meat to market. If that could be overcome, better markets could be created for the meat.  I'm sure the modern mining interests in Nome would like better market access too, but that's not what spurred my interest.

Rejected hypothesis

This is the way science works. You make a hypothesis, you form a prediction, you test the prediction, and then evaluate your hypothesis.

We are forced to reject the hypothesis of massive rural influx into urban areas as the data does not support it. I, myself, was wrong. This graph pretty much says it all:

More at the ADN, where the story is from.

Not only do we need to revise our hypothesis, but it appears the data supports an nearly opposite mechanism! a) Students come from primarily urban areas and b) Among rural areas, those worse off economically appear to export less students! Speculating, this may be because households worse off economically cannot afford to move their households. Or, they tend to value living in situations like their current situation more than the additional leap in economic opportunity.

No one else would put it in economics speak like that, so here's an example: C lives in Alakanuk. With commercial fishing having crashed in the area (and subsistence having been slashed), C decides to move his family. C compares other places - Bethel, Dillingham, Anchorage, Nunapitchuk, Kwigillingok etc - for characteristics including 1) economic oppertunity, 2) current relations 3) similarity to C's preferred ideal of a village/city/whatever. Among those options, he makes a decision where more than immediate economic oppertunity factors in. ("Anchorage has more jobs, but I've got family in Dillingham, and he can get me work on a boat"). 

You'd test this by finding out who moved, who moved where, and whether presence of relatives or some other similarity factors influence movements more than chance. Sounds like a project for some young aspiring masters student out there. ;)

Phew! And, was Alaska Worth it to the States?

I've finished my week long sprint to the finish line, yesterday, and I was so burnt out I loitered around drinking Moose Drool and doodling while watching TV for the rest of the day. A friend of mine told me I look like hell, which means I probably look positively monstrous to the public at large (since my friend is not exactly the `most polished` of people...). Still, it's done, which means I can go back to normal life for a week, before the holidays strike. :)

Enough about me! Was Alaska worth it? To the states, that is. Arctic Economics makes a great point:

An annual gross state product of over $40 billion is not the appropriate benefit measure.  That's gross, not net.  Moreover, $40 billion - or whatever the right benefit figure is - would have been heavily discounted in 1867.  Still more - Alaska costs a lot to maintain; the $7.2 million was a start; we had to defend it from the Japanese, rebuild it after the 1964 earthquake, and pay the heavy costs of governing in this large, remote, and often hostile environment.

Instead, they argue, you need to look at the differences between the outcomes if the US had bought Alaska (what we have today) and what would happen if it hadn't. It's hard to quantify things such as the benefit of having a military base near the far east (apparently it's at least worth Eielson Airforce Base's operational budget), but Dave Barker at the University of Iowa takes a crack at it.

Of course, the more ego-centric question is "Is Alaska better off having been bought by the US?" That's harder to quantify. If we were to assume Alaska would be bought by England (and ended up part of Canada), politically it would depend on whether Alaska ended up acquiring provincial status. Given the comparably large population of AK, I think it might have (~600k is larger than the population of Newfoundland and Labrador) - it's my gut feeling that Candian Provinces enjoy slightly greater autonomy than American States.  Definitely the Alaska would have better representation - Somewhat better than 3% representation, compared to our <<2% representation currently. While whether Eskimo have done better living under US law than their counterparts living under Canadian law is highly debatable (there's a Ph.D. dissertation for Rural Development somewhere in that topic!), the fact that NWT spun off Nunavut as a separate territory and Quebec is granting areal autonomy to Nunavik definitely speaks somewhat better of modern outcomes.

It would be very interesting to quantify each outcome, but it appears at least politically, Alaska drew the short straw!

I don't have an appropriate picture to go with this post, so here is a random fox: