Howzit Howard

Work: Private sector vs. public sector

While I was sick, and sleeping a lot, my back hurt a little. It was no big deal. If you hack and cough around the clock your back muscles will get sore, too. But I also have chronic neck pain, going back many years, and Bernadette finally pressured me into seeing a chiropractor.

It was okay; the stuff he did to me didn't hurt, though it also didn't relieve my neck pain; and I was glad to get out of the house for the first time since going to work on Monday, even if I was so tired I went straight to bed when I got home. But it was interesting to fill out a form that asked me what activities I enjoyed in my free time.

What free time?

A lot of white collar employees in the private sector will tell you, though I may be an extreme example, that they bring work home with them, that it has gotten steadily worse since the 1980s, and that their salaries, worked out as hourly wages, show a much lower hourly rate now than in the 1980s because of all the "free work" that has by degrees become part of the job.

Blue collar workers in the private sector have had their own problems, chiefly the outsourcing of their work to contractors who are paid less. Companies in trouble develop heroic measures for surviving that inevitably play havoc with their employees' lives; then it's seen as a standard business practice and companies that aren't in trouble adopt the same behavior. No offense, pal, it's strictly business.

Well, we're used to it. We even accept, at least conditionally, that it may be necessary to keep America competitive in a global economy.

But this is why private sector citizens get so incredibly angry when they read in the paper about Manuel Castro, a Honolulu city government manager who took kickbacks from his workers for verifying overtime that they didn't actually work. Workers whose base pay came in a little above $40,000 were being paid more than $90,000 a year for work that wasn't actually being done.

Castro is going to jail and has to pay some restitution. But there is more to this scandal than one corrupt man. Civil Beat reports some employees of the city road maintenance division make more in overtime than in regular pay, including overtime claims which sometimes overlap each other. If this makes you think maybe Castro's own supervisor should be fired, too late: he retired on a pension.

Castro asked for a second chance, but it turned out that he had already used one up, having been sentenced to community service for robbery in 1987.

This is a small, close-knit community. We all know people who work for the counties, the city, the state. We know good people who don't put in for unworked overtime, who would never countenance it, even if "everybody does it," because they live by a code. We also know people who work for the government who think they work really, really hard, who have a lot more free time on the job than most of us do in the private sector.

Ask around: you'll hear it even from people who are married to government workers. That's because government workers who feel, perhaps correctly, that they do more than their part, still bring home stories about that oaf in the office who takes two-hour lunches every day.

In a booming economy this would still be an annoyance. In a recovering economy that is still a little wobbly on its feet, akamai government workers know this is not the year to be pressuring state lawmakers for any action on their own behalf that will lead to higher taxes on everyone else. And heaven help you if someone else like Manuel Castro comes to light during the session.

 

Economic recovery and Hawaii banks

On Friday, we will begin to get the fourth quarter results of Hawaii banks, when First Hawaiian will report its end-of-year results. Generally speaking, all our local banks have done good to excellent in the slow recovery. First Hawaiian and Bank of Hawaii have reported enviably low percentages of non-performing loans in the past few quarters.

How one evaluates a bank's performance, however, depends on one's perspective. A bank, like any publicly-traded company, operates for its shareholders, and it also has responsibilities to its regulators, and these responsibilities can sometimes be at odds with what the community served by a bank needs from that bank, especially at a time like now.

"The economy" isn't really a single entity but the accidental sum total, even in a small state such as ours, of hundreds of millions of individual sales, purchases, loans, leases, swaps, paychecks, bonuses, commissions, tips, gifts and other transfers of wealth. And economic activity builds momentum as the same dollar is used for this and then for that and then for something else altogether.

Right now our economy is slowly picking up steam as more people fly here for vacations and spend money here that then recirculates into the non-tourism parts of our society. The recovery can also be seen in military spending. A manager at Watts Constructors is as likely to feel personally that things are getting better as someone who stands behind the check-in desk at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Where we aren't seeing it yet is non-military construction. We're not seeing much new housing construction because home sales are improving only slowly. Even with, in all likelihood, the lowest mortgage rates of our lifetimes, people are reluctant to trade up to a better home until they feel more secure about their employment. And the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association reported Friday that their collective sales in 2010 rose a meager 1%, despite pent-up demand by consumers who have been driving their old cars past their usual trade-in times.

In  brief, the parts of our economy that aren't in full recovery mode yet are the ones that rely on transactions big enough to involve getting a loan.

In theory, our banks could solve this. The cost of getting money to lend out has never been lower for them. They could aggressively market mortgages and car loans. But they aren't. Some of them are dragging their feet on lending of any sort. Why? Well, the recession was caused by a Wall Street meltdown that was itself triggered by reckless mortgage industry lending. We praised our local banks for not getting caught up in that; now do we expect them to change their thinking and suddenly start pressuring all of us to borrow money for homes and cars?

But bankers say it's no fuzzy quasi-theological caution that stays their hand: their low percentages of non-performing loans has been good for their stock prices, so they feel a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders n ot to fiddle with that.

It's a trickier call for community bankers than may at first be apparent. The first responsibility of a bank is to stay solvent for its community. On the other hand, unless a bank grows by stealing customers from rival banks, it grows mainly by helping its community grow. And that does indeed give the bank a good economic reason to give the economy a push here and a nudge there when it recognizes a citizen or a business that is going to be good for what it borrows.

I speak to a lot of business people, especially the little guys who founded and grew their own companies, and it's a funny thing: they all have stories about their early days, when one bank told them no but another said yes. They never forget the banks that believed in them.

Letter from sick bay

Hello. I cannot speak well, so I am writing. A few days of dry cough, nothing, really, gave way Sunday to coughing for real, and feeling achy, Monday, when I was at work, it got worse, and Thursday will be my third day on sick leave, home, miserable, bored.

It's flu, I guess - it seems a bit severe to be a mere cold - but I haven't been feverish in any important way, just congested and coughing and sneezing and scratchy-voiced. If I drink a couple Diet Cokes, which I had recently cut way back on, I can obtain a low monotone for awhile.

Hot and sour soup seemed to help. Drinking loads of water helps. Taking two scalding hot showers a day seems to help, though I'm not sure what the mechanism is for that improving my condition. I've been sleeping in a super-warm jogging outfit acquired years ago for a winter trip to the Grand Canyon.

Bernadette made chicken and dumplings, and that helped, too. Is the chicken grease an emollient for a sore throat? But I haven't had much appetite, and two meals a day have been more than enough.

I've tried to avoid medicine... broke down and took a decongestant a couple of times but both times it seemed worse after the medicine wore off. Relieving symptoms without cost would be okay but otherwise I'd rather just get through this thing.

 

The Sixties: Movies vs. real life

The movie "Pirate Radio," which came and went rather quickly about a year ago, came into my living room last weekend through the patented miracle of electronics, and surprised me with its intermittent fealty to what the Sixties were really like.

Thanks to most movies about the Sixties, most people today have incomplete or inaccurate ideas about what the period, now four decades ago, was really like. So it was refreshing to see a film that captured to a degree how things were.

Very loosely based on Radio Caroline, which broadcasted rock music from a ship in international waters when Britain's subsidized government radio wouldn't, the film captures what disc jockeys were like at the time, harvesting sex from fans while taking only the music seriously.

To understand the Sixties, it helps to understand when they were.

You see, the Fifties, the Eisenhower and Kennedy era of peace and prosperity, really lasted well into the early 1960s. It was the era of Telstar - both the pioneering communications satellite and the cheesy synthesizer record came out in 1962. It was an era of plastic and Pop Tarts (introduced in 1963). We believed in technology in that era. In 1962, John Glenn orbited Earth, and New York got an automated subway. "American Graffiti," made in 1973, was set in 1963. President Kennedy, who would be in his nineties were he still alive, was assassinated in 1963 at the age of 46.

To the extent that the Sixties was an era of political activity - mostly pro-civil rights and anti-war - and an era of free love - and an era of widespread drug experimentation - and a golden age of rock - we may say it began in 1963 when Lyndon Johnson became president. Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique" in 1963. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Coke began making Tab. In 1964, Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship off the British coast. Bob Dylan turned the Beatles onto marijuana. Lenny Bruce did time for obscenity. A sit-in is held in the administration building at Berkeley. LBJ and his advisors decide to escalate the war in Vietnam. In 1965 came the first draft card burning, also at Berkeley. The Jefferson Airplane debuted. In 1966 the Doors formed. The Summer of Love, with its Be-Ins and Love-Ins, came in 1967, also the year of the musical "Hair" and the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

For me personally, born in 1953, I escaped the early Sixties. As the oldest of six kids, I had no older sibling to turn me on to rock-and-roll, and found it myself only around 1967 when I was in junior high school. By 1970, the year I became a senior in high school and the year I began working in radio, it was obvious that the Vietnam war was lost and wouldn't last much longer, and that the civil rights and feminist movements would win in the end, and that rock-and-roll was here to stay. By 1972 when I dropped out of community college to take a full-time job as newsman on a rock station, the political side of the Sixties was nearing all its goals, leaving more time to concentrate on the free love part, made possible by, and everyone always capitalized it, The Pill. There were other accoutrementa of the era that would be more transient - bell bottoms, long hair, lava lamps. For me personally, the Sixties ended in 1975. The station I worked for changed ownership and fired me, and I got a job anchoring on an all-news station in Washington, D.C. In 1977 I met my first wife Marilyn and the following year we married. This was good timing: I missed such evil influences as herpes, HIV, cocaine and disco.

Even at the time it seemed to me that there were several kinds of people in the Sixties. There were young people like me for whom it was mainly about the music and the girls. There were older men who were really stuck in the Fifties but taking advantage of the free love part. And there were the political activists for whom it was really about putting an end to racism, sexism and war. After I was married I discovered classical music and stopped listening religiously to rock, and the next time I went looking for it, it was gone, balkanized into half a dozen streams of music, none of them as exciting as the music that came out from 1967 to 1969 (except when the grunge sound came along in the 1990s - I thought that was every bit as vibrant as the music of the late 1960s).

An interesting thing about history is that no one living through has the same experience as anyone else. Some of what I have written may seem "incorrect" to a reader who had his own very different experiences, probably because of age but also perhaps because of geography. I was too young to be at Woodstock, and too young to be drafted - I did get a lottery number but it was above 300. The Sixties must surely have been experienced more intensely by someone who was there at Berkeley for the sit-ins and draft card burnings. I read that a wounded survivor of the recent Arizona shooting was also present at the infamous Kent State shootings in the 1960s. Imagine that! And of course the Sixties were experienced differently in Hawaii - Marilyn was here as a teenager and met Vietnam soldiers on R&R, only to learn later that some had been killed. Vietnam was a world away for me, growing up in Maryland, but a little closer to the backyard for kama'aina. I expect that the civil rights movement was experienced more complexly here as well.

If you feel moved to describe your own experience with this amorphous thing we call the "Sixties," I'd be delighted to read your own memories.

 

 

 

Days of future past: 1984, Brave New World, and Max Headroom

My high school teachers assured me, at the end of the 1960s, that the future could probably be found in one of two novels: "1984," by George Orwell and "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley. In those days it was fashionable to have students discuss which future was more likely.

Orwell, who also wrote "Animal Farm," expected a new Dark Ages in which "Big Brother is Watching," public opinion is dictated, dissidence is suppressed, and being a free thinker is an even gloomier enterprise than not being one. The world will have three huge countries, constantly shifting alliances so two can temporarily gang up on a third.

Huxley, whose novel is brighter and has erotic scenes, thus capturing the teen vote, expected that people's sensual needs will be so well catered-to that we will be too busy getting our massages to be dissidents to any important degree. In his world, all we care about is our own comforts.

Orwell had been a propagandist during World War II and had certain views about the dangers of such manipulation, especially by totalitarians. Huxley was making more of a commentary on society than on the powerful and the political.

To these two visions of the future, let's add a third, that of "Max Headroom," a 1987 British TV series in which surveillance cameras and hackable computers are everywhere, but they are double-edged technologies that can be used by subversives, like reporters, as easily as by officials bent on repression and concealment of scandal. I was in my thirties when "Max Headroom" came out as a U.S. television series and I thought it was sensational.

Others must have agreed, because current day TV series from "NCIS" to the new "Hawaii Five-0" feature omnipotent geeks who summon up live surveillance cameras or hack into the most well-defensed computers in the blink of an eye.

In 1983, people began writing commentaries on "1984" and "Brave New World," most of them suggesting that the latter book turned out to be more accurate, an assertion which usually turned out to be a platform for bemoaning declining interest in news, and in voting.

In retrospect, I am inclined to say that they were right, although I'm not sure we're any more hedonistic than, say, affluent people were in the Roaring Twenties. Certainly the current generation of doctors has been trained to solve every ill with a pill, and we patients are propaganized similarly, as with the sign I told you about in my hospital room two years ago: "You have a right to be free from pain." We've only recently learned that we have a right to erections. Who'd have thought it? And to think your driver's license is still only a privilege.

Then again, if most people had to choose between automotive mobility and seminal motility, they'd go out and buy a bus pass. But I digress.

I do think "Max Headroom" got the future, which is to say the present, more accurately than the other books, perhaps because Huxley, in his own way, was as intent as Orwell on foretelling a world that was worse than the one they lived in. They saw us as being in the Hades Handbasket and wanted to warn us. "Max" postulated instead a world in which good guys and bad guys are about the same as they always were, but technological progress changes the game. And technology, as Firesign Theatre would say, is a power that can only be used for good or evil.

Look at all those traffic cameras! When the monsoons came, we brought the story to you by punching a few buttons, and live pictures magically appeared from all over. And thanks to modern cell phones, everyone becomes a reporter, emailing full-motion video. When citizens do this, it's called reverse surveillance, since you can watch Big Brother if he should relax his guard and beat the crap out of Rodney King in a public place. A favorite quote of mine applies here. The slick Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau) in the 1966 movie "The Fortune Cookie" says, "You can build a better mousetrap. But the mice get smarter."

Ironically if there is anything that increases the risk of totalitarianism today, it is not technology at all, it is a people problem: lack of staffing in for-profit news organizations, and, so far at least, the absence of sufficient alternative mechanisms for keeping an eye on Big Brother.

 

Music Post: Why early music is the latest thing

Most people who remember history from school will remember events, and some people, but rarely any dates. You know 1492, 1776 and 1812, and after that it's all a blur. Am I right?

When I started reading about classical music, I remember being surprised that it's not very old. I've been at the National Art Gallery, and in the Louvre, and in the Sistine Chapel, staring at paintings that are seven centuries old. But Haydn was contemporary with Ben Franklin. Bach was active in the 1700s.

Until the current generation, books on the great composers, when they mentioned anyone before Vivaldi, Bach and Handel at all, typically mentioned Palestrina, who was born around 1525, but most living people as recently as the 1980s were innocent of having ever heard Palestrina's music.

That changed when the recording label Angel decided to take an obscure 1973 album called "Chant" and reissue it as a CD in 1994 with heavy publicity cashing in on the New Age music craze. "Chant," featuring the unaccompanied religious vocal music of the 11th century as sung at a monastery that never stopped doing Gregorian chant all these centuries, went to No. 3 on the Billboard charts and went triple platinum in the United States.

A harmonic convergence of circumstances favorable to rediscovering ancient music then occurred:

1. A resurgence of scholarship in ancient music, combined with a renaissance in "authentic performances" of the music we thought we already knew, meant that a generation of musicians emerged capable of, and interest in, performing really old stuff.
2. The Minimalist movement in classical music and the New Age movement in popular music combined to create a new coolness for music that was simple and atmospheric.
3. The proliferation of compact disc factories worldwide led to more recording labels and a rush to find repertory that hadn't already been issued by Deutsche Grammophon and his bruder.
4. Unplugged pop tunes played on the radio prepared the collective ear for the troubador tunes of the early 1600s, the time of John Dowland and his mob.

So it is that, Saturday on my public radio show, I can do an entire program of music from the Renaissance, even to the point of playing multiple versions of some tunes.

John Dowland (1563-1626) figures heavily in the program because a couple years ago Sting recorded an entire CD of his music, "Songs of the Labyrinthe," and some of the tracks actually sound like modern day love songs that Sting himself could have written. Of a woman who does not return the minstrel's love, Dowland penned this: "Must I praise the tree when no fruit I find?"

Widespread research into and performance of Renaissance music began in the 1970s and 80s, but as far back as the 1930s it was a fascination of such composers as Resphigi, Grainger, Britten, and, most famously, Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose finest work is the "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis." Not for the first time, I will play it preceded by the original theme in its original form. That will be in the first half hour, starting at 5 a.m.

Some of the finest instrumental music of the 1600s came from Venice, a far bigger, more important, and more cosmopolitan city than Vienna or Paris in those days. Monteverdi and the Gabrielis lived and worked there. Brass ensembles love to play this stuff, and I love to play their recordings. Michael Praetorius was of that time, too, and he'll be on the show as well. Praetorius composed what most people know only as the recorder tune at the end of "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead."

In the final minutes of the show I'll play some modern music that is indebted to the music of the Renaissance, including some Mannheim Steamroller - "Leonardo" from "Fresh Aire 8" - and a couple tracks from the Dutch group Focus, which despite the noisy guitar riffs and yodeling of its one American hit "Hocus Pocus," did a lot of jazz- and classical-influenced numbers.

"Howard's Day Off" airs live Saturday mornings at 5-7 a.m. HST on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku, and KANO Hilo, and streams live on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. The Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook was founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

Astrology, global warming and GMO life forms

It was the end of the 4:30 a.m. "Sunrise Early Edition," where those of us who are on that oh-dark-thirty broadcast sit on the couch, discuss some light story, yuck it up for five seconds, and throw it to the anchor desk for headlines.

The anchor of the earliest half hour, usually Ramsay but in this case Steve, usually has a chance to see the story in the newsroom, but the rest of us are preparing our own broadcasts and the first we know of it and when we're presenting it.

This time it was a story about astrology, and like many stories about astrology it was wrong.

I should explain that I know a lot about astrology. As a teenager I learned how to plot horoscopes because it was a great way to meet girls. All of us are curious about our horoscopes no matter how convinced we are that there is nothing to them.

It has been many centuries since the best minds of any civilization have worked on astrology. Instead it has been plied mostly by cranks, charlatans and dilettantes (like me). This means, even if there is something to it, there is a high probability that the original interpretations have been so modified by centuries of rewriting and translation that we probably aren't getting them right any more.

The story said that you're not the sign you think you are because the zodiacal constellations have moved and everyone is now the sign before the one they think.

What's wrong about that is that the signs are nothing more than a precise division of space into 360 degrees, consisting of 12 equal segments of 30 degrees, starting from the vernal equinox, since you have to start someplace. The zodiacal constellations are merely the stars that happened to form the cosmic background at the time this was thought up (that's why most of them bear no resemblance to the animals that were symbolic of personality traits associated with each sign) and the fact that they have moved since then - it's called the procession of the equinoxes - is of no importance. If astrology is bootless it is not because of this.

People who read newspaper horoscopes, which even astrologers disdain, probably don't realize that real astrology is based on a precise calculation of the actual positions of solar system objects at your birth, with most of the interpretation based on mathematical relationship between them. It's surprisingly complicated. When an astrologer warns a client to be careful of possible argument- and accident-proneness in the late hours of March 7, he's basing it on Mars moving into a position that is precisely 90 degrees around the sky from the birth position of, say, the Moon, and if he has any guts he should be able to nail down the period of greatest risk to an hour or two. Well, you can see how much fun this can be.

One unexpected consequence of learning this bizarre practice as a teenager is that I have spent a lifetime reading dismissals of astrology by scientists who betray with the details in their comments that they don't actually know anything about it. They dismiss simply because they "know" it must be wrong. For example, even Isaac Asimov, of whom I found much to admire, thought astrologers believed planets caused events on Earth. The astronomers who developed western astrology date from a time when cause-and-effect was centuries from becoming the dominant concept of scientific thought. They thought they observed parallelisms and so they measured and tracked them. They didn't know whether there was a cause-and-effect mechanism or not.

We could argue whether skepticism of skepticism is the same as gullibility, but for me the two are very different and there can be no true skepticism without recursive skepticism, because I've seen too many instances where people who think they are skeptical are willing to buy into concepts that I regard as questionable. And in our time we have seen a fair amount of knee-jerk thought about concepts that ought to be considered in a more scientific manner.

Two examples that come to mind are the opposition to genetically-modified plants and the disbelief in global warming. I cite these two because adherents to the former tend to be liberal while adherents to the latter tend to be conservative, suggesting that this is part of the human condition and not monopolized by either the ultraviolet or infrared ends of the political spectrum.

Genetic modification of plants and animals is only a tiny step beyond the modification of plants and animals through breeding, which humans have done for millennia. The most important difference is one in favor of GMO research, which is that scientists are required to be more careful.

I do not mean to be a pollyanna about it. We have seen that GMO companies, while touting their research to produce crops that can grow in drought-stricken developing regions, seem to have put more effort into developing strains that can withstand ever-greater applications of bugkiller and weedkiller made by the same companies. We have seen seed farms promise to plant wind break trees and then not bother to, because someone didn't think it was important.

But this is nothing new. Conventional breeding of roses in the 1800s accidentally bred most of the aroma out of them. My generation never understood why people bothered to say "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" because the roses we knew didn't actually have much smell. Only when someone visiting a small town in Virginia several years ago detected a powerful rose smell and was directed to a graveyard more than a mile out of town did it come to light that roses gone wild in that cemetery preserved the long-forgotten pungent sweetness that led to the old saying.

Global warming, of course, is accepted as an actual trend by the vast majority of experts in the field, which doesn't mean they're wrong, but does mean it should not be dismissed based on a couple of dissidents. Not even the disgraceful fiddling with presentation of data by that guy in Britain makes it wrong.

When you were in school you were told that Atlantic explorers of the 1500s searched in vain for the Northwest Passage. Your maps and your globes showed you that while technically there was a Northwest Passage, it was iced in all year, so as a practical matter it didn't exist. Did you know this is no longer true? Two summers ago the New York Times reported that the North Pole ice cap had shrunk so much that maritime shipping was now using the Northwest Passage in the summer months as a shortcut from Japan to Atlantic ports.

Be skeptical by all means, and let's air contradictory views, but so long as a majority of environmental scientists think global warming is going on, we need to assume the probability of that being so, especially in light of the damage that could result from not doing something about it.

Maybe what I'm really asking you to do is to embrace all possibilities without jumping too eagerly to new ones. Experts can be right and they can be wrong and the longer you can accept both outcomes of any scientific debate the better it is for advancing human knowledge.

 

 

 

The four kinds of bias in news reporting

It's that time of year again, when students with term paper assignments email Uncle Howard asking for help. One kid just wanted my opinions, so I batted out a few, though I felt like there were others who could have given better responses. Another wanted me to do all his work for him so I didn't answer.

A student at Punahou is planning a speech about, as she put it, "Opinionated Media," and she had several highly specific questions about it. I wasn't going to answer because answering the questions thoughtfully would take a lot of time, something in short supply as I cover a complex economy. But then it struck me that I could write my answer here and slay two winged creatures with a single rock.

So here goes.

I identify four kinds of opinionated media reporting.

1. Accidental bias. This is by far the most common. It means the reporter tries not to be biased, and doesn't think his story is biased, but bias slips into it because his own views give him a better understanding of one side than another. Many newsrooms, for example, are staffed predominantly with younger journalists, who, being human, are going to have a deeper and more immediate understanding of the problems of young adults than older ones. They may understand at an intellectual level the issues of the elderly, but they viscerally understand the problems of single people trying to pay the rent. Nothing increases your interest in stories about home sales and mortgage rates like buying your first home yourself. In some newsrooms, where either a liberal or a conservative political view may predominate, people can do biased reporting without realizing it because they are exposed to one side more than the other. The Wall Street Journal does an excellent job of covering the economy and the business world but seldoms questions the fundamental beliefs of that world. Analysts who speak about the industries they cover have a deep understanding of the desires and concerns of those industries, and of their shareholders, but not always of consumers.
2. Deliberate bias. This is a newer phenomenon, where programs are created with a deliberate intent of catering to a particular viewpoint, usually with the justification that others are doing the same thing on the other side. Rush Limbaugh famously said, "I am equal time," when asked why he didn't represent more liberal views on his program. What he meant was, he felt the rest of the media leaned left, so he was deliberately trying to represent the other side. This point of view later led to the creation of Fox News.
3. Sequestered bias. This refers to editorials, commentaries and other forms of journalism where the writer or speaker makes his views very clear, and the content is sequestered in an area of a newspaper or program reserved for opinion. The Wall Street Journal has a very conservative editorial department, but its news reporters are more evenhanded. My own somewhat unusual job, combining reporting with commentary/explanation, sometimes leads me to express opinions, and in a nod to traditional editorial writing I try to make my views so plain that anyone who disagrees can just tune me out on that particular topic.
4. Viral bias. The Internet has seen a proliferation of email newsletters, Facebook pages and YouTube videos which, while technically obtainable by almost anybody, are largely aimed at people who already hold the views espoused. They are preaching to the choir. It happens on both sides of the political spectrum. As a political independent I see both sides. (Addendum: I wasn' t claiming special sensitivity when I wrote that, but rather was telling you that both sides forward their emails to me so I literally do see the screeds and sneering humor from both camps.) These play an important role in political discourse, because they reinforce views already held, and when people buy into such viewpoints, they become capable of seeing unbiased reporting as biased. This happens because, when two views are represented, they see one as truth, which goes without saying, and the other side sticks out, leaving for such a person an impression that the story was slanted to the second viewpoint.

The only effective way to minimize bias in a newsroom is to have a variety of viewpoints represented in it. Newsrooms got better when they employed more females and more diverse ethnic compositions. "Sunrise" benefits from having someone as young as Taizo and as old as me on the same team. It improves your collective memory and experience.

Incidentally, society may have made great strides against bias against women or minorities, but many people, including some journalists, are biased against cops, or against government officials, or against civic activists, or against lawyers, or they go the other way and are too trusting of one or more of these sorts. It's one more thing for a responsible journalist to watch out for.

I'll close by making the provocative argument that balance sometimes weighs against truth. Too often reporters who are overworked and up against a deadline will present an issue simply by presenting two opposing views. But what if one is right and one is wrong? What if one is a professional mouthpiece for a wealthy corporation and the other is less articulate? What if one is a professional opponent who fights battles to get people to write checks for his nonprofit? I've noticed that whenever there is a local story about a proposal to close a school, there is an official, opposed by a number of passionate parents. But the single biggest cost escalation in the Hawaii school system stems from never closing an underused school. The school system has twice as many buildings as it did a generation ago with the same number of students. Perhaps the most important lesson for any reporter, and for any consumer of news, is that most issues are more complicated than you think they are going to be.

What's the next big crop for Hawaii agriculture?

We cut down all the sandalwood and we're gearing down sugar production, but what will the Next Big Thing be in Hawaii agriculture? Hint: It's not coffee, it's not macnuts, it's not GMO papaya, it's not any form of fish farming.

The future can be seen already, in the newest annual farm revenue report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service and the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. Even though the report uses figures from 2009, the following list of top crops probably reflects the current farmgate revenue line-up:

1. Seed crops: $222 million.
2. Flower and nursery products: $80 million.
3. Sugarcane: $44 million.
4. Aquaculture: $32 million.
5. Macnuts: $29 million.
6. Coffee: $28 million.

I left out cattle, which in 2009 was roughly tied with macnuts but has probably declined since then due to pasture drought. Papayas and bananas together made for less farm revenue than coffee. All fruits and vegetables put together account for roughly $45 million. I would suggest that combing flower and nursery products is essentially lumping two industries together, since there is a big difference between farmers growing turf and trees for landscaping and those growing orchids. But let that pass.

The point is that the four major players in the seed industry have built a huge industry in Hawaii with seed corn operations on Molokai, Kauai, Oahu and Maui. There has been diversification but mostly they grow corn, and demand for corn seed has soared now that farmers are growing corn for ethanol as well as for food. The seed industry in Hawaii employs hundreds of people and they tend to make better money than other farm workers do.

They grow seed in Hawaii because the climate allows them to grow one crop after another without any interruption for winter. They are not likely to export this work to Central America or the Philippines because the profit margin is huge and there isn't much pressure to curb labor costs. Growing seed under U.S. regulation also helps allay fears of genetically-modified life forms. Most seed is bred to withstand applications of bugkiller and weedkiller, chemicals usually manufactured by other divisions of the same companies. They're also breeding seeds that will withstand drought and otherwise make it easier to produce food in regions of the world with famine.

There is no sign in the report of a spike in farm revenues for local produce for local markets, but remember that the farmer can make more money in a situation he is not only the grower but also the retail seller. There remains much more than can be done for our farmers and ourselves in this area, especially as the economic recovery enables more people to pay a premium for good local food, instead of paying a premium for bad processed food.

Take charge of your mood

A growing body of research shows you can palpably improve another person's well-being by sharing the spirit of aloha. It now seems reasonable to assert moods are contagious.

Take charge of your own. Don't let jerks hijack it. Good morale is too important to be left to others. Your mood is affected by, but ultimately separate from, what's going on in your life.

You know this in your heart. You know a comparatively minor thing can drive you up the wall when you in a bad mood.

Any chronic depressive can tell you it's not really about your "reasons" for being depressed. You can always find reasons. (CF Monty Python: "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.")

This stuff has been proven.

Researchers in Sweden discovered that when people view photos of smiling or frowning faces, their own faces take on the same moods. A measurable effect inside the brain was later confirmed.

Arizona researcher Ellen Sullins tested volunteers sitting quietly - one whose mood was evident and another whose mood was not apparent; the second person "caught" the mood of the first.

"Emotional contagion happens within milliseconds," Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii told the New York Times. 

She videotaped someone describing a sad memory. Then she videotaped him viewing himself. He remarks that he really felt different from his expression. Others were shown that. Rating his emotions, and their own, they based his on what he said, but their own gibed with how he looked. Moods can be communicated to others non-verbally.

"Laughter is a social relationship," Robert Provine of UMBC (the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland) told the Association for Psychological Science magazine Observer.  Provine found we're more likely to laugh at something if we're with other people who are also laughing, less so if we're alone. Laugh tracks work, in other words, if what you're watching is at all funny.

A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry said verbal abuse of children has a measurable effect on the wiring of their brain. A 2006 study said verbal abuse could hurt more than physical abuse. 

Not only do your formative experiences affect the wiring of your brain, but newer research finds this is even true of adults, and affects your recovery from a stroke.

Maybe we're even affected by the moods acted out on TV shows, where a generation of writers who feel drama requires conflict create an endless stream of cops on the edge, sociopathic bad guys, crooked officials, scheming executives and other ill-tempered characters.

"The 'Leave It to Beaver,' model of American polite society in the 1950s and early 1960s is gone," Dr. Douglas Fields, author of "The Other Brain," wrote in a Huffington Post column. "Those black and white sitcoms have been supplanted today by garish reality television programs that showcase domestic and social interactions driven by narcissism, factionalism, competition and selfishness."

A Gallup study on human wellbeing by Jim Harter and Tom Rath identifies five key elements of good feeling, and they report 66% of people feel good about their wellbeing in at least one category but only 7% thrive in all five:

• Career wellbeing: how much do you like your job? This shows the importance of teaching our children that even the most menial work has dignity when we do it well, when we're reliable and pull our weight and treat our coworkers with respect.
• Social wellbeing: do you have friendship and love? This shows, especially for those who are unlucky in love, to the importance of striving to have amiable relations with everyone in our lives.
• Financial wellbeing: are your money problems manageable? This shows the importance of working hard not to live beyond our means, and if our means are limited, the importance of understanding that the best things in life are free, including but not limited to the beach, the library and our friends.
• Physical wellbeing: do you have enough energy for the day? This shows the importance of preventive care, the new focus of most health care givers.
• Community wellbeing: do you fit in where you live? Here is the "Cheers" effect, and an argument for extending aloha to all, even and especially if someone looks like another person who mistreated you yesterday.

The most important thing, though, is to send out good vibes to others. It won't always change the mood of others, but when it does, they'll feed it back to you, and it's worth it for the dopamine.