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March 23, 2006
JUDGMENTAL:
Although it's on Leisure Lane, the Radisson Hotel in Sacramento
is just a frenetic microcosm of networking and other competitive
endeavors, a bulging offshoot of the office.
Take last Thursday, for instance, when a row of
rooms teemed with well-coiffed, ably suited men and women attending
the Accredited Farm Insurance Specialists conference. They sweated
over exams -- a requirement to get credit from the seminar --
and pushed product. Outside their rooms, table after table declared
each vendor's supreme performance in the arena of farm insurance.
"Equine mortality: including accident, injury, sickness,
disease," offered one brochure. "$25,000 for loss or
damage to outdoor trees," offered another aimed at winery
clients. "Swine confinement insurance," said a blue
brochure with a photo of cute pigs crammed together face-to-buttocks.
Attendees wandered at will, milling about the hallway gabbing
and admiring each other's swag -- red, apple-shaped stress balls,
fancy giant blue plastic paperclips bearing company logos, mugs,
pens, T-shirts, hats.
At the end of the hall, where another group gathered,
it was a different story. The folks in there were going about
their business quite seriously, to be sure -- reading through
stacks and stacks of newspapers that towered on their white-cloth
tables like some sort of gray penance. But there was no swag.
They didn't mingle much in the hallway. Some of them -- gasp
-- had bad hair, and a few lacked a certain, oh, fashion sense.
And when lunch was called they grudgingly left their toil to
grab a plate of food, then hurried back to scarf it while they
continued to read the papers.
This was one of the California Newspaper Publisher
Association's annual Better Newspaper Contest judging sessions
(above), in which writers, editors, artists and publishers
from all over California came together to judge each others'
work. About 250 newspapers entered the contest this year, with
a total of 5,000 entries. At each table, two to three judges
read through a stack of entries, culling the best based on specific
criteria -- quality of writing, originality, organization, relevance,
and so on. For each entry, each judge wrote comments -- flaming
was banned, constructive criticism encouraged. The four best
entries from each category were selected, and they will go on
to a "blue ribbon" panel of judges, chosen from all
over the country, who will decide the winners later this year.
It felt a bit like being in a rather long, collegial
staff meeting peppered with comments like, "This one ...
well, it started out great and then just stopped." Or, "Good
topic, but does this person even use a brain when she writes?"
(which was translated into something quippish on the comment
sheet, like, "Nice idea. Perhaps needed more time to flesh
it out. Try to set the scene.") For the tired topic with
a warm-hearted delivery, one judge, from a Sacramento paper,
kindly wrote: "The community probably really enjoyed this,"
or something to that effect. For the occasional shining star,
comments were decisive: "Now here is a writer" or "You
really did some vigorous reporting."
But why were there so few shining stars? The idea
of the "Better Newspaper Contest" is to encourage better
newspapers through peer review. Which is a good idea. And it's
a useful session for the actual judges, and presumably for the
writers who later read their comments. But does it work? Probably
sometimes -- it's a hit and miss affair, with a myriad other
variables determining a newspaper's quality. It just isn't as
simple as insuring a horse, even if the horse can talk.
NO-SPEED INTERNET: It came Friday afternoon,
and it didn't go away until sometime around noon Tuesday -- if,
in fact, it had gone away for good. We're talking about the odd
intermittent outage that plagued Humboldt County subscribers
to Cox Cable's high-speed Internet service, the cause of much
agony last week.
No one we could find was completely certain of
what the trouble was, or when it was scheduled to be repaired
-- least of all the poor souls who waited patiently for long
stretches on the company's tech support line, only to be told
that the problem was not with Cox but with themselves. Nevertheless,
individuals and companies all around Humboldt County were plagued
with the same problems: sporadic (or slow) access to e-mail and
the web, an inability to upload files through FTP and a host
of other net-related problems.
On Tuesday morning, a few hours before the problem
seemed to have been solved, Carlton Nielsen of Nylex.net, a Eureka-based
network consultant, was headed out to Ferndale to help a client
get around the outage. "It has not been a fun couple of
days," Nielsen said. "We've had some clients that have
come back online this morning. Cox has said that it's a congested
trunk that they're trying to get resolved. But it doesn't give
me a whole lot of hope that it will happen. They won't give me
an ETA."
Over in Arcata, the StreamGuys, a provider of online
multimedia content with a national client base, the outages led
to headaches and workarounds. "I don't know that it's gotten
to the point where we have to send anyone home to work from their
DSL," said Andy Jones, a technical services employee of
the company," but I'm pretty sure that there's no problem
there."
Jones said that the Cox outage had spurred the
company to get moving on one of its back-burner plans -- to sign
up with SBC for a high-speed data line as a back-up. "When
there's only two choices, we need to use both in case either
one goes down," he said. "The problems that we've experienced
with Cox has led us to accelerate getting our DSL connection
up as a failsafe."
MAGIC MUSHROOM BONBON BUST: What a long,
strange trip it's been for the Humboldt County Drug Task Force.
Last week, after a month-long investigation, authorities served
Aaron Lee Struth, 25, of Arcata with a federal search warrant
and arrested him for manufacturing little caramel candies spiked
with psilocybin "magic" mushrooms and selling the treats
to people in Utah.
Four to five pounds of mushrooms were seized from
Struth's home on the 900 block of Grant Street in Arcata on March
15, along with digital scales, packaging materials, plastic candy
molds, about 15 pieces of psychedelic candy wrapped in wax paper,
hash oil and 25 pounds of marijuana. What appeared to be a hash-extraction
laboratory was set-up in Struth's garage. Humboldt County Drug
Task Force Agent Kym Thompson said Utah authorities notified
her of Struth's activities, which were made known after a 21-year-old
Orem resident sold six pieces of magic caramel to an undercover
police officer. That arrest led to a dealer in Provo, Utah, which
then led to Aaron Struth in Arcata.
Thompson said when Struth was arrested, he had
just come home from the grocery store, where he purchased caramel
candy supplies -- corn syrup, brown sugar, butter and milk. His
candies, Thompson said, looked like any other caramel treat,
but when examined closely "you can see the little particles
of mushroom in it." She was uncertain if the sweets had
much of a mushroom taste. Between Utah and Arcata, approximately
$100,000 worth of the candies were confiscated. They reportedly
sold for $25 a piece. Struth appeared before a federal magistrate
Monday in Eureka. His case will be tried in Utah. Agent Thompson
said there was no evidence that Struth was selling the candy
locally.
SALAMANDER SUIT: On March 16, three conservation
groups filed suit against the California departments of Forestry
and Fish and Game after those agencies approved logging in an
area inhabited by the Scott Bar salamander. The salamander lives
in the Scott Bar region of Siskiyou Mountains, and was first
described as a species distinct from the Siskiyou Mountains salamander
in May 2005. Its range is limited, and it was listed as threatened
under the California Endangered Species Act.
However, the groups -- Environmental Protection
Information Center, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and Center
for Biological Diversity -- claim that the California DFG has
dismissed protections for the newly defined species, and that
the Department of Forestry has amended four timber harvest plans
to allow logging in the salamander's habitat. "Rather than
heralding the discovery of a new species in California, the California
Department of Forestry is rushing to wipe out the rare critters'
habitat," said Joseph Vaile of KS Wild in a news release.
Neither the Scott Bar salamander nor Siskiyou Mountains
salamander are listed under the federal ESA, but petitions for
their listing were filed last June and an initial decision on
that petition is expected sometime this April.
CORRECTION: Last week's cover story, "On
Different Tracks," misidentified the sawmill located next
to Eureka's Balloon Track. It is a Schmidbauer Lumber mill, not
a Sierra Pacific Industries mill. In addition, an awkwardly worded
phrase may have left readers confused about the date of Eureka's
upcoming municipal elections. They will be held in November.
The Journal regrets the errors.
TOP
Map Away
Humboldt County frees its geographic data
by HANK SIMS
For years, professional geographers and planners
in the Humboldt County Community Development Services Department
and other local agencies have steadily increased the number of
wonderful things they can do with maps.
Nowadays, anyone can go to the department's web
site and download all sorts of interesting maps of the county,
each of them with a different theme. One shows the ranges of
various endangered and threatened species throughout the county.
Another details the speed of population growth in each region.
Others show the location of cell phone towers, types of vegetation,
air pollution, public lands, agricultural preserves, school districts
-- any number of useful and interesting topics.
The technology on which these maps are built is
known as a "geographic information system" (GIS) and
it allows easy comparison of all different types of data -- data
that, before the age of the computer, existed only in tabular
accountants' sheets in musty books stacked away in some dark
corner of the Humboldt County Courthouse, if at all. GIS brings
these numbers dancing to life, translated into three dimensions
and full color in a way that their meaning becomes instantly
apparent to the naked, untrained eye.
The county, like just about every other government
agency in America, has gradually been taking this data out of
the books and putting it into the computer -- long, laborious,
expensive work. And up until now, if any private agency wanted
to use the newly digitized data for a project of its own, it
would have to pay a substantial fee for copies of the most important
information -- $500 for the digital map of the county's parcels
of land, up to $3600 for a comprehensive database detailing the
ownership and value of each parcel.
That all changed last week. In response to a Public
Records Act request filed by the Journal, the Community
Development Services District has changed its policy. From now
on, GIS data will be handed over to anyone who requests it, for
a nominal fee.
Tom Hofweber, supervising planner for the Community
Development Services Department, said that he was largely pleased
that county staff members had made the determination that his
department's GIS data would now be more widely available. He
said that Community Development Services now hoped to distribute
much of the data in question on the Internet.
"Our preference would be is that, if it is
a public record, to make it as easy as possible for people to
get," he said. "We'll post links to our data if possible"
What had changed? Last October, the California
Attorney General's Office issued an opinion stating, in no uncertain
terms, that counties could not charge exorbitant fees for GIS
data -- that such data fell under the aegis of the California
Public Records Act, and so must be made available for "the
direct cost of duplication" -- in most cases, essentially
the price of a blank CD. The attorney general's opinion was the
result of a long-running battle between certain local agencies
in California, which wanted to charge for their data as a way
to recoup the costs of producing it, and a group of geographic
and industry professionals led by the Open Data Consortium, a
Berkeley-based non-profit group that advocates for free data
access.
The Open Data Consortium's Bruce Jaffe, a GIS professional,
said last week that Humboldt County has apparently become the
second county in the state to take the attorney general opinion
to heart and change its policies. Earlier in the month, he said,
Los Angeles County also decided to change its data distribution
policy.
Joffe, who is in the process of sending out letters
to each of California's 58 counties in order to get an understanding
of their current policies, said that his association's successful
arguments to the attorney general were based on the fundamentals
of public record law.
"I'm concerned about this because this is
public information," he said. "The only way we can
keep government honest is by transparency."
In the past few years, with the advent of simple-to-use
but limited mapping programs like Google Maps and Google Earth,
popular interest in computer mapping applications has been booming.
Anyone with even a smattering of technical knowledge can produce
"mash-up" maps that blend easy-to-use geographic services
from Google, Yahoo and other companies with a multitude of different
types of data: crime information from a local police agency,
demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau, even housing rental
information from online services like Craigslist.
The recent release of the Humboldt County data
could help speed along a similar easy-to-use, comprehensive geographic
service that has long been in the works locally, according to
Doug Renwick, one of the principals of the Arcata-based CopiaGroup,
a GIS consultancy that has done work for the county, the Harbor
District, the Seventh Generation Fund and numerous other clients
throughout the state.
"Everything happens someplace," Renwick
said. "And where it happens, and when it happens there,
is very significant. [GIS] is kind of like magic ink. It reveals
stories that you wouldn't see otherwise."
One of the things that he and others have been
trying to establish is a "Regional Geographic Information
Collaborative" that would integrate all sorts of information
on Humboldt County's cities, neighborhoods and wild lands in
an online system that would be useful to everyone, from a scientist
studying a forest or a stream to a tourist looking for a place
to buy a hot dog.
People have been talking about such a system for
years, he said -- several local GIS professionals met to discuss
it again as recently as last week -- but the proposal has proved
"politically complicated." Not every public agency
wants to give up its data. Renwick said that he hoped that the
attorney general's opinion could cut through some of the resistance
and give new impetus to the collaborative.
County Assessor Linda Hill said Tuesday that she
didn't yet know the impact the freeing of land ownership data
would have on her budget. She estimated that her office takes
in an average of $50,000 per year on copies of maps and other
information provided to the public. Every year, she said, three
or four large information brokers pay her office $3,600 per year
for a database of land information and ownership records -- data
that she must now give away for free.
Hill said that all of the information in the database
is public information that anyone walking into her office could
examine for free. What's different is that now they may also
request all of that information in one fell swoop, to take home
and install on their own computers essentially free of charge.
"I think it'll be interesting to see what
comes of this situation, because it hasn't become totally reconciled
yet," Hill said.
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