Monthly Archives: March 2009

Saturday…On not getting it right, civil unions polling result, saving the S-B photo archive, Hawaiian music in Austin

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Time to check the mail.

Pat Tummons, publisher of Environment Hawaii newsletter, sent this comment yesterday via email:

You refer to the Star Bulletin’s story on the sorry state of birds in the US, especially in Hawaii, and praise it as an example of what newspapers do. I clicked on the link to read the story (FYI, I used to get the SB delivered daily to my office in Hilo — that stopped inexplicably after the SB closed its Big Island bureau). Saw that it was bylined with Star Bulletin Staff and news sources.

I don’t know who the SB staff were, but shame on them for identifying the palila as pilala!

The AP story carried in the Hilo Trib Herald also had a mistake that any beat reporter would NOT have made: it referred to DLNR employee Scott Fretz as Scott Fetz — not just once (excusable as a typo, maybe), but
several times.

So even though I lament the loss of newspapers, I lament, too, the reliance on non-local sources for local stories by what newspapers remain standing. In the old days, a story emanating from afar with a local twist (such as that about Hawaii’s birds) would have been “localized” by a reporter acquainted with the subject. I guess that just doesn’t happen anymore.

And more’s the pity.

Actually, I had pointed to the bird study as an example of a kind of citizen science rather than to the news story itself. That point aside, Pat’s comment is unfortunately right on point.

I note, however, that both spelling errors had been corrected by the time the Advertiser ran the AP story this morning.

The Advertiser’s Derrick DePledge reported in The Notebook blog on a new survey regarding civil unions.

If you’re interested in further details, the survey results are available here.

Former Star-Bulletin photography and photo editor Dean Sensui responded to the issue of newspaper archives.

Regarding newspaper archives, the Star-Bulletin was cut off from its huge archives of photographs when it moved to the new offices in Restaurant Row. There was a deal with Gannett in which the Bulletin could scan its share of photos over a three-year period, but David Black did nothing about it until there were only a few months remaining in the agreement.

At which point there was a scramble to get it done.

After he and I argued about how to do it, he finally relented and took my advice. A small group of us scanned and carefully catalogued thousands of photos over a period of several weeks. The Bulletin now has one of the few searchable digital archives of historic photos in Hawaii. To this day I don’t believe the Advertiser has done anything about this, yet the process was very simple.

I got two Powerbooks. One was connected to a scanner. Two people would work as a team. One person scanned the photo, save the file to a disk, then hand the photo to the other person. The second person would open the file that was just scanned onto the disk, then annotate the file with all the information contained on the back of the photo. That person would also add any additional information that could be deduced from that group of photos. For example, in addition to identifying the individuals in the photo, a note would be made that it came from a series of photos about a particular incident.

Another problem was that many of the older photos were heavily retouched for the sake of newspaper reproduction. The photos were sometimes scanned twice: the way it was retouched, then how it looked after it was properly cleaned off. Sometimes objects or signs would show up that were previously obscured.

Black wanted to automate the process. But I argued that this wasn’t a method to process paper. It was a process to conserve historical documents.

About a hundred photos a day were scanned. It was the last thing I did for the Star-Bulletin. George Lee took up the task after I left and so did Richard Walker. Hope that legacy survives somewhere in the long run.

Dean Sensui
Base Two Productions

Hawaiian musicians apparently are making quite a splash in Austin, Texas, this week during the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. A friend in Austin pointed me to the musical lineup along with a few of her photos.

Friday…Beginning with the cats, criminals as mortgage brokers, citizen science, more on the state of newspapers

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It’s Friday, and this week I’m going to lead with the cats. If you’re less than enthusiastic about this, just skip down to the **** down below.

[text]If you have cats, you probably have scenes like this. That’s Toby down below after chasing Harriet from the kitchen and across the dining room until she took refuge at a higher level. But he’s still doing his best to intimidate and annoy her, while Harry takes advantage of the high ground to try to send a little fur flying as well.

It’s usually not clear what triggers these little episodes between cats who spend hours every day in friendly interactions, at best, or more often, casual inattention. They’ll ignore each other for hours, then suddenly decide “that cat” has to be chased away right now!

Toby, the aggressor here, often finds himself running for cover when Romeo decides to assert himself. And Romeo turns into a cowering wimp when Mr. Silverman struts his stuff. And when she decides to assume the mantle of the matriarch, all those boys run for cover.

Cat society is very complicated.

This week’s Friday Felines are brought to you courtesy of the beta version of Picasa for Mac, Google’s software for managing, editing, and sharing images. It’s part of Google’s growing set of online applications, although in this case it resides as an application on your computer but uses Google’s online services to host and share your photo albums.

One advantage is that you can leave comments on individual photos, something that I haven’t implemented on my regular photo galleries. Now I’ll have to think about that option.

I stumbled my way through setting up this Friday’s photos without benefit of reading the instructions. That was probably a mistake, so I’ll refrain from publicly rating the experience.

**** I didn’t have to look very far for another great example of why I’m worried about the demise of newspapers. Here’s a great story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reporting on fraud committed by mortgage brokers with criminal histories, part of a series titled “Easy Money”.

It’s the kind of story, and series, that has only been done by newspapers, of course with some exceptions. Without newspapers, will this work get done?

One answer is, well, maybe.

This week’s stories about a new federal report on endangered birds provides an example. The report got widespread coverage nationally and locally.

Less commented on is the fact that the report was a product of citizen science organized and aided by the federal government.

he first federal State of the Birds report was released Thursday, marking the beginning of an unprecedented collaboration between government researchers and conservation groups — and the underlying data comes from you.
“The data that goes into this report is by and large not collected by a few tin-head scientists or conservation organizations, but by millions of individuals,” said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. “We can begin to put together spectacularly massive databases that show us, in great detail with fine-grained scope, what the trends are.”

Like SETI, the use of millions of personal computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, it’s a way to combine individual efforts into an otherwise unlikely project. Can less ambitious but similarly structured data gathering be used to collect everyday news? Place your bets.

Meanwhile, fallout continues from the demise of the Seattle P-I. Like this cry to save what can be salvaged of the P-I’s archives. Crosscut.com muses on the death of the P-I taking off, in part, from findings of the latest PEW report on the state of the news media.

And San Francisco columnist Mark Morford comes up with his own defense against those who say they aren’t worried about the passing of the newspaper era.

Thursday…Starting the day at dawn, browsing the news, nonbid contracts, David Black in another newspaper deal

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[text]I might as well start the day with a picture rather than push it off to the end. This was taken several days ago. And, yes, that rain did eventually come our way. We got pretty wet several mornings over the past week, unbrellas notwithstanding, but you quickly forget about that part of the experience.

After writing yesterday’s entry on gangs and the Army, I ran across this blog entry critical of the Defense Department’s tardy response to its own gang assessments. The Gangfighters blog looks like its one to check back with periodically.

A couple of unrelated items caught my eye yesterday.

Alumni of the old original Church College of Hawaii, now BYU-Hawaii, are gathering for a three-day reunion next month. The location? Where else! Las Vegas. I’m not sure how the family values thing mixes with the Vegas venue. But hey, judge not.

Then I spotted a story in the Anchorage Daily News reporting that in these trying financial times, we are going fly someone (or a couple of someones) up to Alaska to pick up 32-year old Tyler Ferguson who failed to appear in court on the Big Island to face a DUI charge.

Okay, Tyler’s not a good driver. He’s got a string of traffic offenses going back to December 1995, court records show.

But wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to just tell him not to come back or face arrest? It would keep him off our roads without spending a bunch of money to bring him back and incarcerate him. Maybe that’s just too straight forward to be realistic.

Noted: National Public Radio reported this week on Hawaii’s slumping tourism economy. And the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned both the Supreme Court’s Superferry decision as well as highlighting a recent Maui Times Weekly story by Rob Parsons which rated the Superferry’s performance.

From the procurement file: The Department of Transportation is seeking a procurement exemption for a $13,000 contract with VCA Animal Hospital in Pearl City for veterinary services and supplies for six explosive sniffing dogs that work at Honolulu Airport. The Department of Health is seeking an exemption for a 10-year contract that will pay the Hawaii Community Foundation as much as $4 million to provide investment, management, and grant services for a chunk of change from the state’s tobacco settlement special fund. And it’s going to cost $115,000 to repair an experimental hybrid electric/fuel cell van that is being tested at Hickam Air Force Base. The fuel cell system has to be shipped back to Hydrogenics Corporation in Canada for the repair.

According to the request for an exemption from normal procurement, DBEDT says that the van “must be in operating condition to fulfill a required demonstration period”. But it seems to me that needing a $115,000 repair during the test period pretty much scuttles its chances going forward. Why not save the money and checked off the “flunked the text” box?

There’s a lot of buzz about yesterday’s announcement that Star-Bulletin owner David Black has teamed up with a private equity firm to buy the San Diego Union-Tribune. Here’s the Union-Tribune’s version of the story.

According to the Globe & Mail:

Several months ago, Black Press bumped up against private equity player Platinum Equity bidding for unnamed properties. They discovered they had entwined interests and complementary skills: Mr. Black knew the business, and Platinum had a lot of money – its funds have attracted more than $3-billion in funds.

So Mr. Black, individually, teamed up with Platinum, and they won the Union-Tribune, whose roots date to the 1860s.

Mr. Black serves as a director and adviser for Platinum, a firm that says its expertise is in “businesses facing complex operational challenges in declining or transitioning markets.” Mr. Black, working with a firm with stakes in, among other things, fibreglass, North American Hispanic telecommunications, and construction crane rentals, will be the newspaper man.

Black goes on:

“This is what I’ve done for a long time now in my life, so I have a pretty good feel for it,” Mr. Black said. “I don’t have to go to a mountain top and reflect for months to figure out some of the basics in our business. It can’t be grey. It has to be colourful, local, entertaining, topical and witty.”

One report put the sales price at just $15 million, perhaps 5% of what the newspaper would have been valued at just a few years ago.

Wednesday…Army reports describe gang-related incidents at Schofield Barracks

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You never know what you might find in a collection of government documents. That’s why I love to browse. I used to wander through sections of the university library just to see what was there. Same with bookstores. Now I let my fingers on the keyboard do the walking.

This week, I saw a description of a new web site, GovernmentAttic.org, which compiles documents which have been released in response to Freedom of Information Requests.

Nosing around a bit, I found an interesting report on gang-related crimes involving U.S. Army personnel which described a number of cases in Hawaii.

Taking a closer look, it appears the U.S. Army had more gang-related incidents in Hawaii during 2004-2005 than in any other part of the world, according to a September 2005 report of gang activity compiled by the Army’s Crime Records Center.

Hawaii recorded 8 gang related incidents during the period from January 2004 through August 2005, nearly one-third of the 29 such incidents cited in the report. Bases with the next highest number of incidents were Fort Hood, Texas, which reported four incidents, and Ft. Leanard Wood, Missouri, with three. The Army garrisons at Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels, Germany, also reported a total of three incidents.

The report and assessment of gang activity was ordered by the Army Chief of Staff following two gang-related murders in August 2005, one in Germany and the other in Alaska.

According to the report, incidents were escalated into criminal investigations whenever the initial complaints were found to be credible and the Army had jurisdiction. Two of the resulting 12 investigations by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division Command were of incidents at Schofield Barracks or involving Schofield soldiers or dependents.

In one Hawaii case, the 20-year old husband of an active duty soldier was arrested on base for driving without a license and a small amount of marijuana was found in his car. “Various gang paraphernalia” were also found, and the man admitted to being a member of the Crips, a gang which originated in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

In the second incident, a Schofield soldier and a civilian were involved in an off-base verbal confrontation with two civilians, which resulted in the shooting of one of the civilians. An investigation found the soldier was a reported member of the gang known as “La Familia”.

The report provides a summary:

The gang originated in the prisons of Hawaii to protect the members from other gangs. The gang consists of approximately 100 male members aged 18 to 45. Members are predominantly of Pacific Islander race with a few of its members being from other races. The gang tends to recruit anyone who is willing to join. The gang’s main rivals are the United Samoan Organization (USO) gang, which is the largest organized gang in the state of Hawaii (with no known military nexus).

A follow-up report in December 2006 cited two additional drug investigations at Schofield with links to a gang known as “Street Military”.

• The 21-year old husband of a Schofield Solder was stopped for speeding. A search of his car “resulted in the recovery of 17 bags of marihuana (a total of 35 grams), various items of drug parpheralia and a small amount of cocaine. The man claimed to belong to the “Street Military”.

• Another case involved drug dealing by a Schofield solder, who was caught with “illegal drugs and two scales in his barracks room.”

According to the report, the man “had a tattoo of a Kanji symbol that translates to mean family with ‘Bama-Boy’ under it. This is a marking known to be associated with the Street Military street gang.”

The 2006 report includes this description of the “Street Military” gang.

Street Military – Criminal acts attributed to the gang, occurring on and off-post include Illegal Weapons Charges, Possession/Use/Distribution of Controlled Substances, and Desertion. To date there are three incidents involving weapons. This gang is determined to have a moderate propensity to commit violence. Available intelligence suggests that the gang is moderately organized and has a rank structure. The gang was organized on Schofield Barracks, HI.

The gang consists of approximately 20-25 members ages 18-30. The group is comprised of mostly military members that have come from gang related backgrounds (Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings). These members are not known to proclaim gang involvement but due to intelligence gathered they definitely fit the definition of a gang. Due to the versatile background there are no known colors, clothing or signs. Several members are reported to have a Japanese Kanji symbol on their forearm, which translates into “The Family” with their nickname under the symbol. There is additional intelligence that members of Street Military have decided to form a separate gang called “Wolfgang”. These members motivation to sell drugs was to make money to support a music career. This gang was unstable and unorganized which caused it to break down and disseminate.

The 2006 report also cites two investigations by the Honolulu Police Department where gang membership was noted.

One case involved five soldiers who were members of the Street Miltary and were found with illegal drugs.

“The investigation established the individuals had a rifle that was discharged in a parking lot,” the report states.

The last case involved eight juveniles who were sons of active duty soldiers. Two of them claimed to be members of the Crips.

Investigation established the subjects were involved in a disagreement over suspected drug activity. The altercation became physical, at which time one of the suspected gang members produced a screwdriver and stabbed multiple individuals.”

Gang-related incidents accounted for only a very small share of all criminal cases investigated by military authorities and were rated a low-level threat.

But with civilian authorities shying away from public discussion of local gang-related crimes, and news media failing to follow the scent, the Army reports provide a welcome source of information and perspective.