DBAA: Sex Offender/Child Kidnapper Database

On the Alaska page of the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project, the Department of Public Safety only has one database represented:

Sex Offender/Child Kidnapper Registration Central Registry – This registry includes offenders who have been convicted of sex offenses specified under AS 12.63.100 who have registered and those who are required to register but may not be in compliance. Searchable by name and location. Databases include current address and often photos of registrant.

If you are aware of other, PUBLICALLY searchable databases produced by the Alaska Department of Public Safety, please let me know.

DBAA: Natural Resources Databases

On July 6, 2011 I started the Databases by Alaskan Agencies (DBAA) series. My intention was to take you through one database a week until I’d shown you all the ways that you can search for state government information in Alaska.

For the simple reason that my heart isn’t in this series anymore, the final few entries are going to have a different format and feature multiple databases from a given agency. This seems like a reasonable compromise between achieving a sense of closure and wanting to walk away from this series as soon as practicable.

So this week I give you databases from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources which were posted and annoted on the Alaska page of the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project:

• Alaska Hydrologic Survey Streams Database – “This is an electronic record of all streamflow measurements with supporting data made by the Alaska Hydrologic Survey staff over the years.” – Searchable by stream name or proximity to community. Database entries include stream location, flow data when available and links to text stream reports.
• Alaska Land Records – From the website, “Locate, research and verify land ownership and land use on state and federal lands within the State of Alaska. Access state and federal plats and survey documents. Use Recorder’s Office  to research private lands.” Search by MTR, Lat/Long, Survey Number or Keyword. Search results are Plat maps.
• Division of Geophysical and Geological Surveys (DGGS) Publications Search – DGGS has been very active in scanning older publications into this database. Find digitized copies of DGGS and Alaska-related USGS reports going back to 1900 using author, title, subject, publication year and/or Quadrangle of interest.
• (Land) Recorder’s Office – Search types include: Plat Search, Name Search, Survey Search, Date Search, MTRS Search, Document Number Search, Subdivision Name Search, Document Type Search, No Plat Subdivision, Book and Page Search, and Document input & Unverified Status.
• Spills Database Online Query – From web site: “This online query application searches the Statewide Oil and Hazardous Substance Spills Database. The period of record for this database is July 1, 1995 to present.” Searchable by facility, location or substance. Database entries includes notes of site visits, remediation methods and final disposition.
• Water Quality Reports – Databases uses drop down menus to search by waterbody name, town, area name, hydrologic unit name or hydrologic code. From the website, “Water quality data has been collected from a variety of both surface water and ground water sources by the Alaska Hydrologic Survey. This site is an index to the data that has been compiled in reports or manually collected by the Alaska Hydrologic Survey.”
• Web Geochem- From the website, “WebGeochem is a simplified search engine that uses predefined queries to select and display geochemical data from multiple published DGGS sources. The search engine has three main components:
  • A search component allowing you to select specific sample types and analysis types of geochemical analyses.
  • A secondary search component based on either geographic parameters or on preexisting compiled datasets.
  • A resulting table of sample analyses.”
  • A user’s guide is available. It is highly recommended that you review this guide before searching the database.

• Well Log Tracking System – Search for water wells by driller name, property owner name, property description or well key. From the website, “The Division makes NO representation regarding well location, completeness or accuracy of the data in the database or data extraction procedures provided.”

Would You Vote for Anti-Abortion Obama?

Based on the strong “grow up!” style comments on my last blog entry, I want to ask the following question:

Suppose that President Obama did all of the same things since taking office except for:

- He threw his support behind a Republican “life begins at conception” Constitutional amendment.

- He armtwisted Congressional Democrats into removing contraception coverage.

Everything else was exactly the same. Would you still vote to re-elect President Obama and how enthusiastic would you be about doing so? Please comment.

To keep this post focused on topic, any comments to this post that don’t answer the question above will be deleted without being read.

If you’d like to ineffectively lecture me on the need to be on fire for the President, please comment on the last blog entry. You can also use that entry for more supportive comments.

Support for Obama: What if the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?

I have recently taken some heat here and on Facebook by stating that I’m at best a reluctant supporter of the President. Given that the next President will either be President Obama or Governor Romney, I feel confident that President Obama is the lesser of two evils.  The short version of why I feel this way is that I feel seriously betrayed by the President on my core issues – civil liberties, prosecution of torture* and responsible taxation**. But I’m voting for him anyway because Romney will do all of the bad things that Obama has done and would likely bring back torture and so-called “preventive warfare” if elected. Also, I don’t believe anyone else has a realistic chance of defeating Romney.

But this support isn’t enough for some Obama partisans. They tell me that I and others like me are being childish or upset because the President didn’t live up to our unrealistic expectations and we should be on our knees in gratitude for the President’s amazing performance. But how would these people feel if the shoe were on the other foot? Let’s take a walk into an alternate reality where the President:

- Has all of the Gitmo prisoners transferred to high security Federal prisons on US soil in March 2009 before Congress can react.

- Set up a special prosecutor in June 2009 to prosecute torturers and the people who conspired to make waterboarding the norm in the Bush Administration.

- Vetoed the Patriot Act extensions, which died of a failure to get 2/3 in both houses.

- Vetoed immunity for the telephone companies that spied on us. Although this veto was overridden it was seen as an act of political courage.

So far so good, at least for me and the civil liberties wing of the party. But what if you’re a traditional Democrat and the President also:

- Went from being pro-choice on the campaign trail to supporting the Republican Right-to-Life amendment banning abortion nationally. What if he armtwisted the Democrats in Congress into supporting the amendment?

- Supported and campaigned for a “one-Man/one-Woman” marriage amendment to sweep away marriage equality in the states that had passed it?

- Replaced Don’t Ask Don’t Tell with an all-out witch hunt on homosexuals in the military.

- Worked with Republicans and Conserva-Dems to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil drilling?

For people who say, the President was against all these things on the campaign trail, he also campaigned against Gitmo, protecting torturers, immunity for the spying telecoms and extending the Bush Tax Cuts.

From my experience with liberal and progressive bloggers, I think there would be a sense of deep betrayal among all Democratic women and gays if the President had carried out the measures in my second list. I think they and many progressive straight males would be screaming betrayal and wondering how they could organize a primary challenge. And I would understand this. I wouldn’t whine about how they were weakening the party.

And when this group failed to deny Obama the nomination, I could see them flirting with 3rd party candidates but then taking a good look at Romney and thinking “If we think we have it bad now, wait until Romney takes over.” I can see them deciding to vote for the President and maybe making a few contributions here and there. I can also see them opting out of the volunteering they did in 2008 because they just can’t sound enthusiastic on the phone bank. Despite my joy at the accountability for torture and the end of mass surveilance and warrantless searches, I’d understand their reaction and be grateful for their votes. I certainly wouldn’t scold them for not being on their knees in gratitude.

If this “What if the shoe were on the other foot and YOUR core issues were being attacked” touched you, I ask that you show some kindness to reluctant Obama supporters and stop kicking them lest you push them into the arms of the Greens or Libertarians. Not every progressive who been hurt by the President has my level of tolerance for accusations of insufficient loyalty.

—

* – Prosecution of torture would be handled by the Justice Department, which is an executive branch agency. If Sam is reading this, check out the comments to the last post, which show that the Judicial Branch is our court system.

** – While the President needs the consent of Congress to change tax policy, my expectation in voting for him in 2008 was for him to veto any and all extensions of the Bush Tax Cuts, even if it meant let letting the middle class tax cuts die along for the ones for the wealthy.

Why I Gave the President $50 Just Now

Regular readers know I’ve been exceptionally disenchanted with President Obama for the past year or so. Whether it’s been extending the “Patriot” Act, the Bush Tax Cuts or refusing to prosecute the torturers of the last administration, there’s been a lot of legitimate disappointment for me.

I never regretted voting for Obama over McCain and no one on the Republican side impressed me after Gov. Gary Johnson left the race to no one’s notice. Still my plan was to provide zero support for the President aside from voting for him on Election Day after heaving a heavy sigh.

But yesterday President Obama took a couragous stand on marriage equality.  If we elected our President by popular vote, it might have made political sense. Instead I think it is likely to deny him the electoral votes needed for a second term. I hope that I’m wrong. But his announcement made me feel proud to have him as President for the first time in a few years.

I think courage should be rewarded so I did the following:

• I donated $50 to his campaign.
• I wrote a thank you message on the White House web page.
• I wrote this blog entry.

If you like this historic support for marriage equality, I encourage you to donate what you can, thank the President for taking a stand and blog about your experience.

Does this mean I’ll volunteer or give more money? I don’t know. Actions speak louder than words and President Obama’s support for marriage equality is about the only major positive I can point to over the past two years in my priority areas of civil liberties and access to information. But now at least I will listen respectfully to pleas for assistance instead of laughing/shouting them off.

DBAA: Online Public Notices

Our next stop on the Alaska page of the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project is:

Alaska Public Notices – List of all official public notices in Alaska State Government. Allows for notification updates by RSS and email. Dropdown search by category, department or publish date. A keyword search is also available. Categories of notices include: Agency Meetings,  Attorney General Opinions, Boards & Commissions, Grants, Procurement, Public Notices, Licensing Examinations, and Regulations.

By law, agencies in Alaska are required to post notices of activities in several places. The repository for all public notices is the Online Public Notice system run by the Lt. Governor’s Office. Here you will find all active public notices plus archived notices back to 2000. Prior to 2000, these announcements were posted in the Alaska Administrative Journal (AAJ). The Online Public Notice system does link to an AAJ archive and the AAJ is also available at Alaska Depository Libraries.

This is also the place to learn about proposed regulations before they are adopted, by looking through the section: Regulations: Notice of Proposed Regulations. The proposed regulation notices are sorted by date, then by department. Each notice will summarize the proposed regulatory change and link to the proposed text and in some cases, other background material. The notice will also tell you how and where to comment.

Check it out. Come back and leave a comment if something surprised you.

Book Review: Burn Out by Marcia Muller

Review of:

Muller, Marcia. (2008). Burn out. New York: Grand Central Pub.

Burn Out is the 25th book by Marcia Muller to feature private investigator Sharon McCone. This was an accidental read for me. I had just purchased my Nook Tablet and I was looking to see how it handled library books. So I went to Listen Alaska Plus and searched for ebooks in the mystery genre. Burn Out just happened to be the first one available for download, so I downloaded it.

It was a happy accident. Each page I read kept me interested. The book begins with a very burned out Ms. McCone hanging out at her husband’s ranch. She’s been there five months after a traumatic case and has been trying to consider her next steps. She’d been getting nowhere until a murder case involving a relative of a family friend. Drawn into the case pretty much against her will, it turns out to do positive things for her.

The book is plotted well, the main characters are fleshed out and the various relationships are believable. If you like mysteries and strong female leads, this book might be for you. I was impressed enough that I’m going to track down the other books in the series.

Product Review: Nook Tablet

Short version:

Excellent for PDF reading, nice for reading magazines through Barnes & Noble and watching Netflix. Good basic e-mail and web browsing. A tablet experience? Not so much.

Longer version:

Several weeks ago, I decided I needed something better to read PDF formatted books and reports than my Kindle. My basic Kindle (sans touch or keyboard) does many things well, but providing a comfortable experience reading PDFs just isn’t one of them.

I’m a heavy consumer of PDFs for several reasons:

• I sometimes need to read long articles and reports in the course of my work.
• I’m a government documents fan and many of them are in PDF format.
• My local libraries’ ebook collections have a number of titles that are not in Kindle format, but are available in Adobe PDF or Adobe EPUB.

Reading these long (10+ pages) PDFs on my netbook is tiring because of the need to use arrow keys and frequent mouse clicks. I wanted a simple one click/one touch paging experience for my PDFs like I had for Kindle formatted material.

This seemed to dictate a device with a larger screen, probably with touch. I considered several options, including a refurbished Apple iPad. After consulting some reviews and talking to some friends, I settled on an 8GB Nook Tablet. At $199 it was slightly over half the cost of the cheapest iPad I could touch.

It is great for the stuff that I bought it for. I loaded it up with a PDF of a report on the “moonbase that might have been” Project Horizon and a couple of different ebooks downloaded from my library’s collection. I also stuck in a few PDF articles that had been hard to navigate on the Kindle.

The reading experience was smooth. Minimal scrolling was involved and pages turned with a flick of the finger. The nook comes with a built-in notetaker and highlighter that works on all of the files types it can read, including PDFs.

Like Kindle and Amazon, the Nook is tightly integrated into the B&N online store. The store can be browsed or searched. The browsing experience for magazines is pleasant. Many titles offer a 14 day trial and I wound up subscribing to Discover Magazine, a magazine I used to enjoy but haven’t subscribed to in years in large part because magazines have a tendency to pile up at my home and so I avoid bringing in new ones. But it doesn’t matter how many issues pile up on my Nook.

The magazine experience is pleasing to me. Magazines download as PDFs and many of them also have something called “article view.” This is a plain text view of a particular article that eliminates the need to scroll around the magazine. Issues are delivered by wifi.

Multimedia is good on the Nook as well. It comes pre-installed with Netflix and Pandora, two services I have accounts with. Playback of Netflix content is as good as my large laptop and better than my netbook.

The Nook Tablet comes with a basic web browser and email client and these have worked decently well for me. When I email PDFs to myself the Nook opens them seamlessly.

To this point in time I am satisfied with the battery life and have gone days between charges. Not as good as my Kindle, but I can’t stream Netflix on the Kindle.

Those are the high points and for me, that’s enough. For serious computing, I have my netbook. But if you are looking for a tablet, as opposed to a solid reading/multimedia device, look elsewhere.

There are four major things I think would frustrate someone imagining they could have a good tablet for $200 by buying the Nook Tablet:

• A stripped and locked down version of Android. As you could find out by Googling, the Nook Tablet’s version of the Android operating system is a version behind and highly locked down. Up until December 2011, it was possible to “root” the Tablet to free the system but I think that capability has been taken away until the hackers figure out how to restore it.
• Dedicated storage space for B&N content. Barnes and Noble only allow a user to access 5 of 8 GB on the Tablet and reserves some of the remainder for content purchased from B&N. On something I expect to use as a computing device, I expect to have the entire hard drive to do with as I will.
• A truly pathetic number of apps. As part of their locked down system, Barnes and Noble have a dedicated apps store. Browsing through their apps appears to show only a few dozen in any single category and things that should be a natural, like app one for TED Talks, are nowhere to be found.
• Nook store search is terrible. If you can’t find what you are looking for through browsing, good luck! Especially if you are trying to find apps. One can only search the nook store by keyword. More dismayingly, one cannot filter or sort by type of item. This results in search results for apps being buried by results for books, audiobooks and magazines.

If I’d wanted a tablet computer, I would be disappointed by the Nook Tablet. So I think I’m performing a service by warning would be tablet buyers away from the Nook. But if you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive device for PDF reading and want some nice multimedia features and e-mail to go with it, the Nook Tablet could be for you.

DBAA: Alaska Local and Regional Information

Our next stop on the Alaska page of the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States Project is:

Alaska Local and Regional Information – Searchable by region, borough/census area and census place. Includes data on unemployment, number of businesses, building permits, property values and much more.

This database provides in-depth economic snapshots of a community. These snapshots come with graphs that compares the community to statewide statistics. So you can do things like compare the wage distribution of a given community with Alaska as a whole.

The snapshots are also handy in quickly determining the major employers and industry sectors for a given community or region. For example, here are the top 10 employers in the Fairbanks North Star Borough:

University of AK

Fairbanks North Star School District

State of AK (excludes U of A)

Banner Health System

Fred Meyer Stores Inc

Wal-Mart Associates Inc

FBKS North Star Borough

FBKS Gold Mining Inc

Tanana Chiefs Conference

Safeway Inc

To see a snapshot, you must first choose a geographic unit and click on “go.” You should see the middle of the screen change from “Alaska” to the region, borough or place you chose. Then select the topics you are interested in. You can draw information from the following areas: Worker characteristics, Occupations, Industries, Employers, Unemployment rate, Population estimates, Rental information, New housing units, Tax, Property value, 2010 Census and Migration. Then click on the “next” button for your snapshot.

Next week we’ll examine occupations in detail.

Video: Matanuska, Alaska, 1937?

Click on the photo above to watch an hour and fifteen minute video of silent film from the Matanuska Colony in Alaska from the 1930s. According to the National Archives record for this item:

On the town of Matanuska. Reel 1, a train arrives and passengers detrain. Reel 2 shows a house under construction, a farmer plowing, and views of cafes, a store, and the post office. Reel 3 shows views of the post office and a grocery store. Reel 4 shows the Matanuska Valley Pioneer office. Twin babies are weighed and measured in a hospital. Reel 5, people dance at a community hall. The volunteer fire department fights a fire. Reel 6, horses and mules are unloaded from box cars and auctioned. Reel 7 shows a pioneer family in and around its log cabin. Reel 8, baseball is played before a large crowd. A man dives and swims. Includes shots of puppies.

The puppies and a cute kitty can be found around the 1:05:00 mark.

This video is in the public domain and so can be reused and remixed freely. The video can be downloaded in wmv format for import into editing programs.

The National Archives version of this film does not support embedding. If you find a version that does, leave the URL in comments and I’ll put an embeddable version here.