Infospigot: The Chronicles

Annals of Public-Education Community Outreach

A friend shared this message in which an Oakland public school--a flatlands school with a largely poor and minority population--is allegedly trying to communicate an important event to students' families. I'm at a loss to understand what the people who put this out might have been thinking. Maybe that they are communicating to a bunch of artificial speech machines who will now what the heck they are talking about even if no human can. I especially like the time advertised for the "Community. Meetandgreet": April 30, 2013, from "Eight Thousand Ten-Hundred until Nine Thousand Ten-Hundred."
Did anyone listen to this machine-generated message before they robocalled families with it? Did anyone consider having a human being record a message that might have been a little more personal, not to mention a whole lot more intelligible? Did anyone wonder how this would sound to the majority of school parents who are primarily Spanish speakers (or maybe they got their own Spanish-language machine voice).
It's hard to believe that this kind of pseudo-communication would be found acceptable at an affluent school where parents demand administrators tell them what's happening at the school.

Further Adventures with TV News Fonts

Say you're a news anchor--someone who's paid handsomely to look good while reading the news competently and with enough dramatic flair to let the folks at home know that what you're saying is really important. Question: Does it matter to you when your head appears on the screen next to something that makes you and the rest of the newscast look kind of dumb? (Picture is from a KTVU "10 O'Clock News" broadcast earlier this week, and the handsome head belongs to anchor Frank Somerville.)

(There are extenuating circumstances in this case. This was a newscast item on a high-school science competition sponsored by biopharmaceutical firm Amgen, the 2013 Bay Area BioGENEius Challenge. Whoever came up with the screen title didn't consider that BioGENEius might not translate well to all-caps.).

Somewhere on Friday Night

Somewhere else tonight, madness reigned, and perhaps abated for a moment. Here, it was warm and clear with the tide running full as the sun set.

In Praise (and Otherwise) of Oxalis

In an uncertain world, there's one thing you can count on in Berkeley every late winter and spring: Oxalis pes-caprae, also known around town as oxalis, Bermuda buttercup, yellow wood sorrel, "some kind of shamrock," and sourgrass. "Sourgrass" because the stems are edible and tart, and both our kids, as well as lots of their friends, occasionally picked the grass and ate it when they were little.

On one hand, the plant is not unattractive--the blooms are almost iridescent in the right light--and was once something that gardeners planted ornamentally. I have a neighbor who says he likes to let the plant have its day, seeing how pretty it is for a few weeks every year.

On the other hand, the damned thing's a nuisance. It's ubiquitous, showing up in garden beds far and wide. Once it arrives, it's virtually to get rid of. Pulling it up, you discover it has little white translucent tubers that seem to have something to do with how it spreads. You also occasionally find miniature bulbs from which the plant grows in the fall. Since it's an alien (it's native to South Africa) and invasive, it's more than a headache for gardeners. Here's what the University of California's Integrated Pest Management site says about Oxalis pes-caprae:

Bermuda buttercup was first noted in California in the San Francisco Bay region and has since spread throughout most coastal counties, the coastal range, and into the Central Valley. In the last 10 years, this plant has invaded native coastal dunes and natural areas along the coast, leading to the demise of native plants. It is a troublesome weed that is more competitive than is assumed from its general appearance.

Due to its extensive occurrence in yards and gardens, Bermuda buttercup has the potential to rapidly spread via the production of bulbs and the movement of contaminated soils into adjacent natural areas. Because it is practically impossible to eradicate infested soils of this weed, take care to prevent Bermuda buttercup from invading wild lands.

And here's what the site says you're in for if you're really dedicated to the cause of eradicating your personal patch of oxalis:

The best control method for this pernicious weed is prevention. If new infestations are spotted and controlled early, it is possible to eradicate small populations. Large populations are difficult to control and will require multiple years of diligent control efforts.

Small infestations can be controlled by repeated manual removal of the entire plant. Repeated pulling of the tops will deplete the bulb’s carbohydrate reserves, but these efforts will take years to be successful. Repeated mowing also will eventually deplete the bulb. Cut Bermuda buttercup before it flowers and forms new bulbs. Repeated cutting or cultivation is necessary to reduce plant numbers. The soil from which plants are removed should be carefully examined or sifted to remove bulbs and bulblets, an extremely time- and labor-intensive process. Before planting in an infested area, use soil solarization to further reduce Bermuda buttercup populations.

Soil solarization? Here's the details on what that means.

Understanding Too Late

It's early yet, but the teams I follow in the major leagues of North American baseball seem headed in opposite directions: The Cubs south, having dropped six of their first nine, demonstrating a penchant for losing from in front: the A's north, winning eight in a row after playing their first two games of the season without bats; the A's play far from perfect baseball but when things are going their way, they look like a bunch of kids, no cares in the world.

While watching the A's take apart the American League franchise from Anaheim on Wednesday night--I find few things in televised sports are more fun to watch than a glutted, money-besotted team fall flat on its face the way the Angels did to the underpaid Athletics--Kate pulled out a book of baseball poetry, "Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves." She turned to a poem we've read many times in the past, "Pitcher," by Robert Francis (1901-1987).

Here it is, reproduced without permission (but believe me, not for profit):

Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

That is a gem, a perfect description of something you can watch inning after inning, game after game, season after season and still not see how different appearance is from intent. And that's where I think I tend to read poetry, too--on the surface. In poking around to see if I could find a copy of "The Pitcher" online, I came across a nice analysis that looks beneath the appearance of the couplets to examine the poem as a metaphor for writing poetry (I found a more technical analysis here).

Why didn't I see that? Now that you say it, it's obvious, like the way an inside fastball can set up a slider low and away. Or another inside fastball.

Here's another Francis poem, "Catch." Maybe what's going on here--I'm talking about intent, not technique, about which I know nothing--is a little clearer.

Catch

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight-of-hand, every hand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as-possible-miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posey, a pretty plump one in his hands.

Cathedral Window

My brother John and I were standing on the platform of the MacArthur BART station in Oakland once, years ago. The platform is set in the midst of a big freeway interchange. It's got a nice view of towering overpasses in one direction. Since it's elevated and bounced by four lanes or so of traffic on each side, it actually has an open view to the Oakland Hills on one side and out toward San Francisco Bay on the other. With all the traffic, the soaring, gracefully curved highway structures, the trains coming and going, you're really conscious of how much industry and energy goes into what we build. And more than that, too. Standing there, John said, "These are out cathedrals." Not that we build our highways to give expression to our understanding of the divine, but these structures somehow embody both a creative urge and give voice to how we see our connection with the world.

Anyway, yesterday, I was out on a short bike ride (to pick up the A's tickets featured in another post), and took a bike lane that skirts the Maze, the huge tangle of overpasses and ramps that distribute eastbound traffic from the Bay Bridge south toward San Jose, east and south toward Livermore and Stockton and Walnut Creek and Concord, and north toward Berkeley, Richmond, Vallejo and Sacramento. It was a beautiful early afternoon, and what was most striking was the way the highway structures framed the hills and mountains of Marin County.

First, Daylight 'Saving' Time; Next, Baseball

I have come to that time of life--or maybe it's a passing phase--where I really like the apparent extra hour of sleep you get when you turn the clocks back in the autumn. Those sixty extra minutes in bed seem like forever, the luxury coming when you finally climb out of the sack and it's still kind of early (or at least not noon). The business of turning the clock ahead and "losing" that time--gee, whoever said the forty-seven-hour weekend was a good idea. Yeah, I know it all balances out, and that an hour is an hour, and that the seasonal turning of clocks ahead and back doesn't add a single minute to our time on Earth, and it doesn't take a single minute away. (The foregoing rumination is probably triggered by the feeling that, man, do I have a hard time getting the prescribed x number of hours of sleep that researchers say I need to be a healthy, happy, organism.)

Here's another sign of the turning of the seasons: baseball. Last year, we got kind of involved with the A's again after years of distance born partly the team's indifferent performance on the field and partly from disgust with an owner who seemed to be doing everything possible to alienate the team's fans in advance of moving the team to somewhere else. But last year was really fun. The team dragged along below .500 for the first couple of months of the season, and then with a bunch of rookie pitchers and an unbelievable run of clutching hitting, they started winning and didn't stop until they ran into the Tigers in the playoffs.

Our enthusiasm was such that we sprung for partial season tickets this year. The team sent them this week. When you buy tickets that way, you generally get a specially printed batch that features pictures of the team's stars. We got those this year, packaged in a little bit of extra swag--a very cool A's lunch box. We're ready for opening day.

Year of the Snake

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In TV parlance, the term "font" is often used to describe the on-screen titles that accompany graphics during a newscast. In my relatively brief stint in TV news, there'd by someone in the control room assigned to put the titles together, usually following a producer's or writer's instructions. It's kind of an important job, because mistakes show up prominently on viewers' screens and tend to leave the impression that the people putting together the newscast are rushed, careless, or incompetent. Above is a recent example from what I still habitually call our best local TV news show.

My understanding is that the job of doing the fonts has been handed to the writers, who are also asked to do other stuff--like video editing--that they didn't used to do. It's not that mistakes didn't happen when more people were working on the shows; errors are part and parcel of trying to put out a pile of information on a tight deadline with fallible humans involved in the process. But in the era of smaller staffs and "working smarter, not harder," the mistakes seem to happen more frequently. And if that's the case--my observations are purely impressionistic, not backed up by any statistics--you have to think that as long as the shows pull their weight in the ratings and the ads are all sold, the people ultimately responsible for "Chinses New Year Parade" don't really care too much about what shows up on the screen.

Hey, Is That a Full Moon?

It is alleged to be a "snow moon" tonight--the February full moon. I have been sheltered or culturally straitened, because I don't recall hearing that term before today, or "harvest moon" or "hunter's moon" or any of the rest of the names I hear used to describe the full moons of various seasons in are mostly indoor-dwelling, non-harvesting, non-hunting society.

In the suburbs where I did my first conscious moon-viewing, it was always, "Hey, it's a full moon," twelve months out of twelve. Then inside to see what was on the TV. If snow lay on the ground, a circumstance that might coincide with any moon between October and April, that could be a snow moon. Or a thaw moon. Or an wind chill moon. Or a balmy out-of-season moon. Or a do you want to go for a walk? moon.

But again, more likely would be: "Is the moon full tonight?" The question giving way to speculation and giving license to throw around terms like gibbous and waxing and waning and opposition.

The moon name I've run across for this second-month moon, this late northern winter moon, the sobriquet that rings with some meaning is "hunger moon." Yes, I can understand that. Snow could come any time after the final harvest or after the game became scarce with the cold. But by this time, within shouting distance of the turning of the season, you can imagine hunger tightening its grip as larders emptied and rations grew short. Let us please hang on till our food returns.

Crime Statistics, Lives Lost

A little earlier this month, I wrote something about being preoccupied by a small database project on Oakland's homicides from last year. I should use the word "small" advisedly. Even though homicides represent a small slice of Oakland's overall crime for 2012--the 500 or so shootings, the 2,200 other assaults, the 214 rapes, the 4,126 robberies, the 12,549 burglaries, the 7,020 stolen vehicles, the 6,006 larcenies--violent death casts a uniquely dark shadow across a community and robs it of any sense of security.

That's the abstract level. On a more personal level, I wanted to gather as much information as I could on who had died, how they had died, and the aftermath of the deaths. That meant going from the Oakland Police Department's often incomplete daily spreadsheets, which note times and locations of reported homicides, to media accounts that have the identities of victims. This is far from a novel project, unfortunately; the Oakland Tribune has been doing profiles on all the city's homicide victims for the last several years (in fact, when I hit a dead end on finding names in several of these case, the Oakland police suggested we check the Trib's year-end wrap-up, which had yet to be published). Back in the mid-90s, I edited a long series of stories at The San Francisco Examiner in which we tried to do a personal profile of every San Francisco homicide victim for a calendar year (we had reporters chasing after homicide investigators for details in more than 100 cases, I think; I was even less popular than usual among the reporters). Many news organizations have undertaken similar enterprises. The common thread in all of these projects, I think, is an attempt to humanize the people lost in the statistics.

As I wrote earlier, one pattern that emerged pretty early looking at all these cases was how relatively seldom anyone was arrested in the killing (at KQED News, we did a story last week that took a quick look at the most obvious reasons for the low arrest rate: lack of police resources, an underfunded crime lab, and, most important, the fact many people in the neighborhoods suffering the most from the plague of violence simply don't trust the police).

For that story, we turned my homicide database into a map (below). You can click on the dots for the basic details of every death. Red dots show homicides that have not yet been solved. Green dots show cases that have been "cleared"--which means someone's been arrested and charged. Yellow dots are cases ruled to be justifiable homicide. The single blue dot is for an officer-involved shooting also ruled to be justifiable homicide.

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