00;00;00;08 - 00;00;09;28 Mike Welcome back to Alaska voices. Mike Douglas at the International Arctic Research Center. And I'm here with one of the OGs of the Alaska Voices Project, Jesse Young Robertson. 00;00;09;28 - 00;00;17;17 Jessie I'm Jessie Young Robertson. I'm a research associate professor over in the Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension. 00;00;17;18 - 00;00;43;10 Mike This episode brings together a couple of conversations around legacy. I think sometimes we can think about our professional legacy and our personal legacy, and they're all kind of part of the same thing. My colleagues are friends, and many of my friends are colleagues, and my place in the world is not just predicated on professional outputs and research products and communication products, but also the people I help and the work that gets done. 00;00;43;11 - 00;01;00;16 Jessie As scientists, I think we ponder this question a lot. Like what would be my contribution to this field, or what would be my contribution to the people that I train as they go forward? If people are too stuck on leaving a legacy? Do you think that impacts how they interact with the world right now? 00;01;00;24 - 00;01;34;09 Mike If you're stuck on what's going to be left behind when I'm gone. It can, in context, help you do things that lead that way. Right? You've got a goal, and these are the steps I'm going to take to get to that goal. But also it can force you to focus too much on that far future. If you're too focused on legacy, you're not focused on the here and now, on being there in the moment when someone needs something or the critical moment happens to get that great work done, or being unwilling to contribute to things where good work will be done as a result of your work. But no one might remember your name. 00;01;34;09 - 00;02;10;18 Jessie I produce a lot of art, I paint a lot, and I give a lot of art away. And it's never from the perspective of like, now they have one of my pieces of art. It's more like just sharing something with the world that nobody will ever know who I am or was. It's actually relieving to think like I'm not really that important except to the people that I care about. And that's okay. When we have friends and colleagues who pass away and we think about what's that energy they left behind, you know, what's that imprint on the world they left behind that we would probably think about for the next 20, 30 years, as long as we're still here. 00;02;10;18 - 00;02;24;17 Mike I’ve got professors from my undergraduate, which has almost nothing to do with what I do now, but I still think back to moments where they were there for me. They gave me advice. That's their legacy in my mind, even if we haven't spoken in a decade. 00;02;24;18 - 00;02;47;26 Jessie So the next conversation is one that I recorded with Doctor Dave Valentine, who is now retired. We recorded it in 2023 and this conversation is called, “Field Log: A full career of fundamental boreal forestry.” 00;02;47;28 - 00;02;52;04 Jessie My name is Jessie Robertson, and I'm talking to Dave Valentine, who's my colleague and friend. 00;02;52;04 - 00;02;57;26 Dave And I am David Valentine. We are on the campus and I'm talking to Jesse, my colleague and friend. 00;02;57;27 - 00;03;05;28 Jessie So our colleague John Yarie passed away this last summer in June. He's one of these folks that retires and then stays. 00;03;06;02 - 00;03;23;22 Dave He would be in his office most every day working on getting papers written. John was a guy who took very seriously the idea of being a scientist and getting science done. You know, all of this stuff that still hadn't been written up by the time he retired. He still kept working at it. 00;03;23;23 - 00;03;48;23 Jessie He moved to Oregon after he retired, and he got a place just near Matt's parent's house in Corvallis. And so we actually went and visited him on Christmas break, like maybe a year and a half ago in his new house. So he's a bummer when something like this happens, when somebody retires and and then they pass away pretty quickly after. So I wonder what his hopes were for retirement. 00;03;48;25 - 00;04;07;20 Dave It makes me sad knowing that that he's not around and knowing that that happened way too early. You know, that that just was it was a complete shock. It wasn't out of character that we didn't find out about it until kind of after the fact. He was never somebody who would complain. 00;04;07;23 - 00;04;10;17 Jessie So let's go back in time. So when did you get to UAF? 00;04;10;18 - 00;05;54;02 Dave If we want to rewind the clock back to my first experience with John. It was actually back in 1986. That was when I was starting a PhD with Dan Binkley at Duke University, and we came here to UAF, and I was really looking for a project for my dissertation. And the professor of forest soils at the time was Keith Van Cleve, and John Yarie was his postdoc. He was very much the same, personality wise, as I remembered ten years later when I came to work here. He was pleasant. He laughed a lot. But if he saw something that was worthy of some ridicule, he would ridicule it in a gentle sort of way. But he tended to call ʼem as he saw ʼem. They wound up coming here in 1996, and John became my close colleague in the Forest Soils lab, and at the time, I started working on my own projects out at the Caribou Poker Creek's research watershed. John had some projects going on for the lab, and because I felt like I should be part of the lab, I went and helped on those projects as well. But there were times when the projects that John had dreamed up would keep everybody busy. The biggest one, I think, was the project that he started back in 1989, and that was a project to understand how moisture stress affected the growth of various tree species within floodplain and upland forest ecosystems, and all within the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest. 00;05;54;05 - 00;06;57;12 Dave He dreamed of this idea of putting up greenhouse panels, supported by a frame that would capture the water around the tree trunks, and channel all that water off to the side, and then block any sort of soil moisture moving in and out of the plot by burying vertical sheets of plastic all the way around the plot. And I thought this was crazy. How are they going to deal with this problem and that problem? Well, I learned that they tried to minimize how much water was going along the tree trunk, through the holes around the tree, by damming off the water so they would flow around, and they would take down all the panels every fall so that the snow in the wintertime wouldn't collapse them. And then they'd put them all up in the spring as soon as we could get out there, so that they would start being effective again. And it was just a kind of a remarkable experiment. And he managed to get that replicated in three different floodplain sites, in three different upland sites. And over time, that just mushroomed. 00;06;57;13 - 00;07;29;10 Jessie I was a post-doc when I first met all you guys, people were saying, oh, you should talk to John because they're doing this moisture experiment. And I talked to him about like, could we put sap flux sensors in the trees? And he was like, no. So he was just worried about the sensors affecting the tree growth, which is fine. But when he and I would talk and at first I was like, okay, he's sort of interested in what I'm doing. That's cool. But then he would always end with, do you want to come help with the shelters? Because he was always angling to get an extra person to come help with the shelters. So I think I helped maybe like 1 or 2 years. 00;07;29;14 - 00;08;06;09 Dave I sort of felt like I was about as close to him as people got, but I wouldn't say that I was close to him. He enjoyed going out to pub for a Friday evening of beer. In fact, he would often instigate that sort of thing. That was about as far as it would go. My wife and I moved houses here within town back in 2011, and we recruited as many people as we could find to help us, like, you know, do all the physical moving. And John was right there. I didn't have to ask him, you know, specifically, I just kind of said, I'm trying to get as many people as we can. And he voluntarily came out and broke a serious sweat helping out. 00;08;06;11 - 00;08;38;05 Jessie I remember something Matt said, like Matt felt like he was to accurately represent this, like sort of following John around to make sure that John survived the day, whether John rolled the snow machine onto himself or whatever. But John just sort of went for it because he's just like, yeah, at one point they had the boats out and John just like loaded the ATVs on the front of the boats. And then there's times John would just go for it and really shallow water with the boats and stuff like that. And that's like, oh my God, like, what are you doing? 00;08;38;07 - 00;09;00;04 Dave I can pretty well relate to that. I remember being in a boat with John a few times where he would just keep it the throttle up, and he would be going around these turns in the river where there are logs sticking up from under the river, and we would come close to them sometimes. And the riverboats, because they're flat bottomed with a jet motor, they don't. 00;09;00;05 - 00;09;13;20 Dave When you turn, they basically do a lot of side slipping. And so we would be side slipping along. And it wasn't clear to me that we were necessarily going to have the new direction fully dialed in before we hit one of those logs. It was always a little bit anxious for me. 00;09;13;21 - 00;09;37;19 Jessie I don't know if it's a generational thing, but there's sort of the sense of just like things are just going to work out and things did just sort of work out, you know, there wasn't a lot of angst around it. Whereas I think maybe for those of us more that have come on the last maybe 15 years, there's a lot of angst around everything because there's just fear all the time around budgets and having a job next year and just filling out contract, all of that. 00;09;37;21 - 00;10;34;05 Dave He had reasonable justification for that. You know, he's a tenured, full professor who was in the system at an early enough stage that if he had to retire, he was sitting pretty. There really wasn't that much for him to worry about. I remember his frustration as budgets were being cut. Now, most of us experienced a mixture of apprehension and anger, right? The anger from the injustice of it and apprehension from how is this going to affect what matters to me, not just my job, although that's there, but also things that I'm doing that I think are important. And as near as I could tell, he experienced only one of those. That's anger. He was pissed. Don't these people understand this is important? How are we going to manage our forests if we don't have a forestry department? How are we going to train people for this stuff? The injustice of it was what motivated him. 00;10;34;06 - 00;11;09;09 Jessie We've had a couple of tours come through the lab and they were just saying, yeah, it's a shame. There's just not a lot of training going on for up and coming forestry. Anything, you know, even like there's no certificate, there's none of that. And the argument that I keep making, I'm like, gosh, we live in what is it? The largest terrestrial biome on Earth. And the perspective of the forest is just mainly for like, what products can it give us, other than the fact that it's this place that we live? That's a massive part of the climate system and the terrestrial... It's just it has two sides to that. Then, you know, as a lab, we've managed to secure a lot of resources to do a lot. 00;11;09;10 - 00;11;10;03 Dave Thanks to you. 00;11;10;06 - 00;11;43;12 Jessie Oh, thanks. It's just interesting. So at least, you know, in some ways it's worked out for us. And we feel better than we felt in a long time in terms of security. But on the flip side, you know, I've had people reach out to me and be like, oh, what kind of forestry classes are being taught? And I'm like, none, none. And, you know, is there a forestry department? Nope. It's like both frustration that we're in the forest and we, you know, there's not a lot of interest in forestry research, but then it's also worked out in our favor because we're more I feel like we're more stable for us, soft money folks that are, like, perpetually afraid. 00;11;43;18 - 00;12;47;01 Dave I would put a slightly different spin on it. I'm just going to draw a contrast between you and John from my perspective. John would write proposals and so forth, but there was always sort of a sense that, you know, these people should realize that this is important and they should just get on with it and spend the money. What's wrong with them? I think that you put the effort in to make sure that people understand the importance, and you convince them in your proposals. This is important work to be done. You keep the marketing going, as it were. And I think that that's the difference. That is one difference, not the difference. So I think that's where John's kind of it'll all work out philosophy maybe falls down a little bit because people didn't automatically see the world the way that he thought was obviously should see it. As you go ahead and do the convincing, the arm twisting to say, damn it, this is important, this is really key and we have to be on this. You better fund this because if we don't, we're we're going to be missing out on this incredibly important aspect of the climate system and so forth. 00;12;47;02 - 00;13;07;10 Jessie There's a lot of research in the boreal forest in Alaska that's still like foundational fundamental research that it seems like so much research now has to be applied to why Joe Schmo down the street is going to care about it, and all the broader impacts and all this stuff. And not everything lends itself to that, and it doesn't make it any less important. 00;13;07;17 - 00;14;05;24 Dave John looked at the science that he thought needed to be done, regardless of how sexy it was. It's like, oh, here are some things that we need to know. We need to know how fast logs decompose. He's never going to get much of a paper out of it. The people that are going to get papers out of it, the people who are going to have their careers benefit from it, are the people who are going to be writing those papers, you know, another 50 years from now. He just recognized the importance of it. And when he decided that it's like, okay, we're going to go ahead and get that started because that's what you do. That's what the science needs. And that was his motive. It was what does the science need? And then go do it. That was the kind of thing that John wanted to see done and was willing to make the effort to see done. And that's the sort of thing that I think we miss. If we don't have people like John and we don't have funding mechanisms like McIntyre, Stennis that that are able to be used for those somewhat unsexy but still necessary data streams. 00;14;05;24 - 00;14;41;21 Jessie And they fund positions that NSF can't find. You know, NSF will never fund a full time technician. You know, if we want good research, then we want continuity. We need to throw funding at staff scientist positions that our tech positions, these funding streams are really important for this type of long term research. And then John pointing out there's some stuff you just have to do to get the ball rolling so that someone at some point benefits from the knowledge. 00;14;41;23 - 00;15;26;19 Mike The unit I work in is really focused on applicable science and actionable science, and sometimes we can lose sight of the basic science that's necessary to make that happen in the first place. We work in climate science, and so often we talk about 1900 to present. Right. And that means that someone has to have been collecting data in 1900 for us to have a baseline that can can work out to 2026, and then we can use modeling to go out to 2100. Like, I could not name any of the folks who set up those initial readings back in 1900, off of which all of our historical baseline data is based. But the work they did was critical, and I'm grateful to them, whoever they were, for doing the work that they did, so that we can do the work we need to do now. 00;15;26;19 - 00;16;09;02 Jessie Everything we do in science is a building block on the last thing. So every major discovery across the board was because of a million other small discoveries. Funding is really tilted in the direction of it has to be transformative, whatever that means. And sometimes, you know, things are transformative, very micro levels, but they're really important. And it might be stuff population doesn't care about. And that's okay. It's just we have to still do it. And that's definitely the case in the boreal. And that's what I've been coming across. But this study that Dave was talking about, this moisture manipulation, it went on for 25 years. So for 25 years, by golly, they went out every spring and put the shelters in and they took them out every fall. 00;16;09;02 - 00;16;55;07 Jessie And what's cool about it is it's like hitting a system with a hammer. Just saying. If we take it all away, what happens? We have a postdoc who is a dendrochronologist. And so we went out and cored all the trees that experienced this manipulation. We're looking at how these, essentially, changes in climate dynamics for the vegetation affected, how the trees grew. Even looking at tree rings is looking at the legacy of what that tree experienced. And essentially what they did to this project is tremendous. They jotted the trees with snow removal, they drought to the trees with rain removal. And they're like, which is more important? And then we're seeing how it was laid down in the legacy of the tree. One thing we think about with John's legacy, too, is just what can we do in science to lay the train tracks for something we may never benefit from? As, like me in the moment. 00;16;55;07 - 00;17;02;19 Mike That will lead us into another conversation here. This was recorded in 2017. You recorded this conversation as well. 00;17;02;20 - 00;17;24;21 Jessie So this is Jessica Garron and Elena Sparrow. Both of them are faculty here at UAF. So this one is called mentors as both friends and role models. 00;17;24;23 - 00;17;36;08 Jessica My name is Jessica. I am 41 years old and I'm at UAF talking with my mentor and friend Elena. 00;17;36;09 - 00;17;53;08 Elena I am Elena Bautista Sparrow. I am 74 years old or young and we are at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And I'm talking to Jessica Garron, who is my mentee. 00;17;53;09 - 00;17;56;20 Jessica Before today. Did you know that you were one of my mentors? 00;17;56;20 - 00;18;54;28 Elena I thought I was, but I wasn't I wasn't going to claim it unless you you know, I know because we've been friends. I mean, we've known each other a long time. In fact, I was delighted when you took over our study, our experimental oil spill study that we had conducted one in the winter, one in the summer, and then there was a lag time. And then that was what you focused your, your thesis on. And I was delighted because I wanted to see what had happened. But we didn't have the resources to study it further. And I knew you would do a great job. And you, you did. You did a super job. And so I thought I was contributing something, you know, like my prior field site. But then also, as you learned, you know, I was learning with you. And so it did seem like the mentor mentee in the different sense that some people might, might see it. 00;18;54;29 - 00;19;11;02 Jessica I think that what I've learned from you as a mentee is a lot about balance and imbalance, because when we first got to know each other was on the weekends or late at night. 00;19;11;02 - 00;19;12;08 Elena Yes, yes. 00;19;12;14 - 00;20;27;24 Jessica When I was working in the lab on that experiment that you're talking about, and mostly you and I would meet on to and from the bathroom as we were racing back and forth. But not only did you conduct that initial experiment that I was following up 30 years later on, but I was seeing this woman, PhD. There were not a lot of women PhDs in my life, who was working all night, who was writing grants, who was writing papers, who was married to another scientist who seemed to be like way more relaxed and not freaking out and stressed out as much as we were at the time it was: Elena is doing it all. She's a member of her community. She's a mother, she's a wife, she's a scientist, and she's still going and she's still going. Your stamina is inspirational, but yet, you know, alarming. You know, I think about you up at like 10:00 at night, 11:00 at night when I'm up at 10 or 11:00 at night writing and I'm like, oh, I know Elena is down in the valley writing. 00;20;27;24 - 00;21;30;16 Jessica She's still awake too. And I think, you know, a lot of times like, well, you know, would Elena just say, go to bed at this point? Or would she keep going? And I would think Elena would say, go to bed, but Elena would keep going. And then I go to bed. But then just watching you move through your career in the, I guess it would be about the 15 years that I've known you now, it's very comforting watching you continue to succeed and watching your scientific horizons expand. And I feel like your career trajectory has given me confidence to have a nontraditional scientific career as well. I have no intention of being a tenure track scientist. I think there's a lot more science to learn and give that doesn't have to fall within the traditional confines of academia, and I think I learned that from you. 00;21;30;18 - 00;22;40;00 Elena I had the opportunity to apply for tenure track positions. And I, I told my husband and I said, no, I don't want to be in a tenure track position. I don't want to have to write proposals. It's funny now because what? So what do I do? I mean, I write proposals and that's how I support myself through soft funding. It should be called hard funding because it's hard to find the money. But it's because I'm in a place where, you know, I'm invested in what I'm doing. I really like working with teachers. I really like working with students and inspiring them to become scientists themselves. And it's a different satisfaction that I get not just from writing from journals, because that takes a while for that satisfaction, you know, if it's accepted. But when you see how excited the kids get, it's always been also a pleasure. My pleasure, when you come and help with all this outreach that I've been doing, and you're always so enthusiastic and it inspires me back. So you see, I get inspired by my mentees like you. It's so heartwarming. 00;22;40;02 - 00;22;41;08 Jessica I'm glad I can help. 00;22;41;10 - 00;22;47;00 Elena Yes. More than help. Yes. Thank you. I'm grateful for you, too. 00;22;47;02 - 00;22;53;02 Jessica So you've had a full career. What are you hoping your scientific legacy will be? 00;22;53;04 - 00;23;02;07 Elena You know, if all my legacy is that I have produced one scientist, that's enough for me. 00;23;02;10 - 00;24;05;09 Jessica What I say to myself and what I say to my mentees. Now that I have been mentoring for a while now myself, is don't waste the gift. You were given this life and these interests and these strengths, and it is your responsibility to make the best you that you can, whether that best you is a scientist, a teacher or an artist. It doesn't matter. It's your responsibility not to waste the gift. And if that person or self is going through a hard time, sometimes it's one foot in front of the other one 15 minutes to the next 15 minutes and things always look better after a good night's sleep and a good meal. But you'll get through this. You'll come through the other side. 00;24;05;10 - 00;24;10;22 Jessica It will all work out one way or another, but don't waste a gift. 00;24;10;23 - 00;25;35;29 Elena That's what my original mentor, which is my mom, always told us. Children, she said, you have been given gifts by God and so you need to use those and not waste it. Same as what you said. So that that really rang a chord in my heart. And we were poor because my mother was widowed twice and had to raise five kids. We were six kids, but one child died during when he was young, a baby. And so my mom said, I don't have lands to give you. The only land I have is the where the flowers grow in the flower pots. And so she said, but education I can give you. And so she worked really hard, so that every peso she earned, she saved ten centavos out of that because, you know, education wasn't free. She just made sure that we had food on the table and clothes to wear. She would sew our clothes so that we would have education. So so that's that was my my mentor, my original mentor, my mother. 00;25;36;02 - 00;26;00;27 Mike Both of these people are just fantastic in science. And also they're coming at it from an engagement in science that is a little less about a hypothesis and a replication, and a paper that then goes to do this thing and is more about either education or applicability. A lot of the legacy you leave lives in the heads of others, instead of on spreadsheets and databases and papers. 00;26;00;27 - 00;26;37;09 Jessie The way that I train people is I want them to understand what they're doing and why. Like, anybody can push a button and write down a number. And so I try to talk about, you know, this is what we're doing. This is why this is how it's used. You know, while it seems like we're just measuring one little number, it fits into the picture in this way. And my hope from that is if people just carry one thing with them after they leave the job. What does it mean to be a scientist? What does it mean to think as a researcher? What does it mean to really ask ourselves what we're doing out there versus just doing a job? I've done a lot of supervising, hopefully mentoring. What do you think is the difference? 00;26;37;14 - 00;27;45;18 Mike Supervisors are a quantitative, whereas a mentor is more. What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What's important to you? What's meaningful? Do you have a goal on what are you doing to get there? I feel like often mentorship comes out of respect, right? The mentor is chosen by the mentee. We don't choose supervisors. That's the person who is in charge of you. And to a degree, you have to take that feedback the way they give it. Whereas the mentor is like, I, I see where you are, I see who you are as a whole human being. I want advice, I want you to call me on my stuff. I want you to help me improve in those situations where I have felt like maybe supervision or leadership or training has edged into mentorship. It's always been because the situation is more holistic, right? I've lived in a field research station where all of life is together, right? You're eating together, you're sleeping in the same kind of bunks, and you're working all day and you're in this one office, like, these are your only people. And so in those places, it's not just about, are you getting the work done? And is the job happening? It's about, are you a person that people feel comfortable around and safe around. 00;27;45;19 - 00;28;19;10 Jessie As a mentor in life or work or whatever? It's helpful to let people know how others experience them so they can learn a little bit more about themselves and help them see themselves clearly. It does feel safe when people see you clearly. I think that benefits any of these relationships where there's a little bit of a power imbalance when it comes to seeing other people clearly, give people the dignity and grace when they're trying to tell you something and don't run it through your own filter. Sometimes people are doing their very best. 00;28;19;13 - 00;28;46;26 Mike So we're going to transition over to another conversation. This one was recorded in in 2025 by Lia Ferguson. It's a conversation between Craig Stephenson and Bob Torgerson. These are actually two guys I work with really, really closely over at the Scenarios Network for Alaskan Arctic Planning, and it's called Supercomputer as stepping Stone. 00;28;46;29 - 00;28;56;22 Craig So I'm Craig Stephenson, I'm 41. I'm from Fairbanks, Alaska. Originally born here. My relationship with Bob here is friend and frequent colleague. 00;28;56;23 - 00;29;11;25 Bob And hi my name is Bob Torgerson. I am 38. I was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska also. And yeah, old colleagues and friends with Craig. So Craig, knowing where we're from, I wanted to ask you, how did you get your start here at the university? 00;29;11;26 - 00;30;29;21 Craig So basically, just growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska, I'd always been kind of interested in computers, and I'd heard that you've had a good computer science program, and so there was no question in my mind that I would just stay here in state tuition, go to school here, get my computer science degree. I applied for a student position at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, ARSC, which is a place that I'd always heard about growing up here, that there was like a big supercomputer up on the hill at UAF. But just his idea that I was already into computers and knowing that there is this really powerful supercomputer, one of the fastest ones in the country, fastest one of the state, probably. And so I applied there, got my job there. It was a bit of a culture shock because having heard about how powerful this thing was working in the office, all you saw were people, like working in terminal windows, just the most primitive thing you could possibly imagine. And it was kind of a magical place for people who are getting all this work done just by typing words into this black box. And then from there, I just kind of worked there for two years as a student, four years of staff, then worked at International Arctic Research Center and then worked at the Research Computing Systems RCS. And now I'm at Snap Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning. 00;30;29;23 - 00;30;31;05 Bob A lot of acronyms we've been through. 00;30;31;05 - 00;30;34;01 Craig So that's how I got here basically. So how about you? 00;30;34;02 - 00;31;14;04 Bob My story is similar. I was born and raised here in Fairbanks, was always interested in technology ever since I was a little kid. I remember the first computer that my dad bought us was an old Compaq, and he thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So did I. So it was very quick for me to fall in love with these things and start to kind of teach myself a little bit of programing. When I was growing up, I actually started with Pascal programing, strangely enough, which nobody uses anymore that I'm aware of. I remember I made my family a Christmas card from 3D generated, well, it was actually 2D generated imagery, just like circles that were drawn via Pascal, and there was like snow that would come down for this snowman. 00;31;14;05 - 00;31;14;25 Craig Sounds awesome. 00;31;14;26 - 00;32;57;02 Bob Yeah! So that got me into like my passion for computer programing and going to the university here happened just simply because I wanted to stay in Fairbanks. I love this town. One year in 2010, I happened to go to a job fair because I was getting to the end of my term as a senior and wondering, what am I going to do with my life now? And I ran into Oralee Nudson and she became my mentor and boss when she hired me to work up at ARSC also. ARSC being that supercomputing center that we talked about previously, I started as a student in 2010 and got my master's degree by 2012, and then after that I proceeded to get hired on full time, which was really neat. The only downside being that the DoD had pulled funding from us about the same time that I was hired. I remember that, yeah, it was sad times. There were a lot of people going in and out pretty quickly. It felt like mostly out. And so I took over a position for storage admin after another storage admin had either decided to leave or just wanted to move on to different things. And I did that for ARSC for three years until they closed in 2015, and we officially became the Research Computing Systems in 2015 and worked for them for another five years as the main storage architect. And then in 2020, as the pandemic hit, very much uncertainty about the future, Bruce Crevenston approached me about the possibility of a remote job, which at the time was, yeah, a real blessing. It was like that was kind of the first foray into what could be remote work going forward. Hired on in July of 2020 and have been working there ever since. So I'm coming up on my five year anniversary for snap here. 00;32;57;04 - 00;33;02;19 Craig Yeah, you were one of the ones that convinced me to him to snap. So yeah, yeah. So that worked out really well for both of us, I think. 00;33;02;20 - 00;33;03;14 Bob Yeah, for sure. 00;33;03;16 - 00;33;12;26 Craig We both have computer science degrees, and a lot of our jobs have involved a lot of IT over the years. But like this is just pure programing most of the time. Yeah. It's just nice. 00;33;12;27 - 00;34;18;20 Bob Yeah. It's certainly a change of pace. The difference between this is that there's never an on call situation for me, and being in RCS for that long or for ARSC, there was always on call, and when you were the only storage person, you were always on call, regardless of whether or not you were on call for that week. I remember there was one time, a Thanksgiving morning sitting there watching a Macy's Day Parade go by and I get a bunch of buzzes on my phone, and I look at them and they're all, I kind of had hoped. It was like friends or family saying Happy Thanksgiving. It was actually that the data center had just gone dark, and so everything in there had gone down hard. And one thing I know about computers is they don't like to go from being hot spinning to just cold off all at once. Ended up spending the entire day for Thanksgiving from about, I want to say 9 a.m. until almost 9 p.m., bringing everything back up, fixing all the problems that came with like we had to actually swap hard drives of systems so that they would boot up in a different chassis. I remember these very distinct conversations we had like, well, this is the Hail Mary, we've got to try this or it's not coming back. 00;34;18;21 - 00;34;20;11 Craig Doesn't sound like the best Thanksgiving. 00;34;20;12 - 00;34;42;28 Bob No, but that's what I really appreciate about this, is that we're not a 24/ seven shop. We do have downtimes that are acceptable. And yeah, we don't have to be on call for any one given period. I know for a while there at RCS, you had multiple multiple projects that you were constantly being asked to do. Did you pull one together at the last second that you can remember? 00;34;42;29 - 00;35;49;16 Craig Well, a lot of them had pretty sharp deadlines, but the thing that comes to mind the most is the aurora forecast to the Geophysical Institute. I was partly involved in developing that in mostly involved in keeping it online. And during the four years I was at RCS, it just got more and more popular. Even like tourist companies were like linking to it from their pages and things like that. We could see in the Google Analytics that we're getting like 2 million people a month viewing that thing. And eventually it reached the point where aurora activity was so high that it could be seen from like, Montana and stuff, and it got linked from the front page of CNN. And then our server started melting. Once that started happening, we're getting enough legitimate traffic and potentially some denial of service traffic. Just keeping that thing online was extremely challenging. Long story short, I found out if somebody bombards the server with like 600 requests in five minutes, you can just ban them for an hour and the problem goes away. So that was my way of fixing that website. So it stayed online while I was on the front page of CNN. But Iʼd never run into a situation like that before. 00;35;49;17 - 00;35;57;13 Bob No, we yeah, don't often get like 2 million views like, or that number of viewers so rapidly. I would just say. 00;35;57;14 - 00;36;20;22 Craig It's just interesting because you spend a lot of time when you're doing this kind of work, trying to figure out how to keep things performant, able to cater to lots of people at the same time. But that's the the first real example in real world that like, oh, wow, this is I have to do this for real now. We need to figure this out was pretty satisfying. 00;36;20;24 - 00;36;26;02 Jessie Whenever I heard the word supercomputer, it just makes me think of a really large computer. 00;36;26;05 - 00;36;29;02 Mike Physically larger. 00;36;29;05 - 00;36;55;05 Mike Which some of these were. Computers are very large, these guys, and the work they used to do, and also the work that they do now is very behind the scenes. You know, they're maintaining the infrastructure, they're maintaining the code. And when I say infrastructure, I mean both physical hard drives like Bob was talking about and also kind of data infrastructure that all of our researchers rely on, that these big data sets that all gets fed into and then comes back out of. 00;36;55;05 - 00;37;15;03 Mike And very rarely is that seen you know, it's seen on Thanksgiving Day when everything goes down and all of a sudden every process that you were trying to run on the supercomputer is suddenly not working anymore, or your data disappears or your process doesn't run right and you need help. And then all of a sudden you learn Bob's name. 00;37;15;03 - 00;37;21;11 Jessie When we talk about data, what exactly are we talking about? Because we do talk about data in terms of like social media recording our data. 00;37;21;12 - 00;38;40;05 Mike Sure. A great example would be like if you have kids or if you were a kid and your mom measured how tall you were against a door and you know it would be the name and it'd be the date, right? And that's a data record. If someone measured me all when I was a kid and in in 1993, Mike was this tall, and in 1994, he was this tall. In 1995, he was this tall. That's a longitudinal data record of the growth of a single person. And if you care a lot about me, that data could go together with whether I got sick and how I was doing in school and what I was eating to tell you a lot about an individual life. Or you could take all those heights of all people and understand human growth trends in Pennsylvania in the 90s. You know, it is four degrees Celsius. That's a single point of data. It comes with where it is, when it is. All of that information needs to get stored as a piece of data for social media. This computer went to this website and clicked on this button at this date. At this time, that's data. So is you know, this tree had a mean breast height, circumference of this many centimeters on this day. And so getting them to talk to one another becomes the game that these guys are playing in perpetuity. 00;38;40;10 - 00;38;57;19 Jessie It's like taking life and putting into numbers, you know, like they're being stored somewhere so that we can access them again. Can we take all this information, not even look at the person or look at the tree or look at the landscape and know something about it? Even just a hundred years ago, we were just writing things down. 00;38;57;19 - 00;39;06;22 Jessie So the amount of information in the world that was recorded in one spot was minuscule compared to how much was recorded in the last 30 seconds. 00;39;06;22 - 00;39;28;20 Mike And so the more data we record, also, the more information we have, and the more we need to have a deep understanding, a critical understanding of the nature of that data, both in its broader context and individually, in order to say anything meaningful about it. And that can really trip people up. We've got one more conversation here. You've recorded this one as well. 00;39;28;22 - 00;39;39;23 Jessie I sure did. I recorded like 50. So this is one between Orville Huntington and Wilson Justin. And we recorded this at the Alaska Forum on the environment. 00;39;39;25 - 00;39;49;17 Mike This one is called storytelling as a Conduit of Culture. 00;39;49;19 - 00;39;55;01 Orville Iʼm Orville Huntington I don't know who my partner is, but I'm not related to them whoever they are. 00;39;55;01 - 00;40;04;26 Wilson Wilson Justin. All my partners are friends and compatriots and clan relatives. Want me to start? 00;40;04;28 - 00;40;06;08 Orville Yeah, you could go ahead. 00;40;06;09 - 00;40;25;08 Wilson Storytelling in our Ahtna region is foundational. It's our school. You learn everything you need to know through stories, everywhere you need to go through stories and everything that you need to interact with other people through storytelling. Is that how your your background is? 00;40;25;13 - 00;40;33;15 Orville It's similar. When we're younger, we just listened and then like right now and learning from you and a bit younger. 00;40;33;17 - 00;40;46;17 Wilson When I was growing up, the storytellers would talk to each other to make sure they have the story right. If you were lucky enough to be close by you, you can listen, but you can't make noise. You are in the background. 00;40;46;19 - 00;41;14;15 Orville I can remember a lot of times they expected us to remember certain events, like 1939, when the salmon were so plentiful you could walk across the river on them, and they tried to figure in my mind as a scientist how much that was. And I come up to somewhere around a million king salmon and probably no number on chum salmon to many. I remember that date for them since they worked so hard. Remember that one time. 00;41;14;17 - 00;41;34;20 Wilson When I first heard these stories? They were all in our language, you know, just that's Athabascan, Ahtna, no English. And as I began to have this English come into my life, by the time I was eight, nine, ten years of age, it started to create a lot of confusion. A lot of the terminology didn't match. 00;41;34;23 - 00;41;48;07 Orville A lot of times when they told me broken English, I misinterpreted what they meant. So a lot of this stuff sounded funny, but really it was a the way they were telling it. It was supposed to be told in Athabascan. 00;41;48;09 - 00;42;35;12 Wilson I was only allowed to basically ask a question once because they expected my memory to work. Like their memory. Their memory is infallible. They remember things 30 years ago, 40 years ago on a wide range, and I can remember linearly stuff that I did, but not what other people did, which is what our elders could remember. You talk about cousins and relatives doing things and other places, and since our existence is glued together by stories and songs and language, all of our laws and everything, I have a certain way of looking at stories that the younger the next generation won't be able to accommodate. 00;42;35;13 - 00;42;42;06 Orville Right. A lot of the young ones, they don't know Athabascan anymore, so you have to get it as close as you can in English. 00;42;42;08 - 00;43;24;05 Wilson One of the things that English doesn’t adequately capture, in reference to the indigenous storytelling context is the importance, the enormous importance of the stories by itself. We consider stories to be alive, and they're a neighbor, a friend, a protector. When I hear a story, it's like being at a neighbor's table or a friend's table, having supper or something, and you don't get a sense of that in any place in the scientific literature. I don't know how long you've been on meetings and boards, but that's pretty, pretty tough to sit there and read. 00;43;24;08 - 00;44;23;10 Orville it's tough to listen to. And then just talking to you this short time, you're way more knowledge than any PhD that I sat down with the last 20 years. Just the way you tell the story and what you remember, that your people and the upper Tanana, they saved a lot of culture. You guys saved Yukon area, southeast area. And then I know some of those stories and songs and stuff. You guys held on for a long time before you gave them back, and we did that a little bit on the Koyakuk because we go over Kobuk River all the time, but it was a different language. So my grandmother got used to speaking in Inupiaq, even though that wasn't our people, they wanted us to kind of save some of their story because there was a lot of people coming in. They weren't allowed to speak their language or nothing. We weren't able to save the songs, but a lot of the stories we saved for them. 00;44;23;13 - 00;44;54;24 Wilson We had the what they call the old time chief talk, which was used in Potlatch oratory. So if a chief went down to Nenana and used that language, a lot of what he said would be understood. If I went down there and my mom spoke, they would have a hard time following it, because that would be a very local clan dialect. Our trade language used by a medicine man was multicultural, kind of a mixture of all the different languages and words along the trail. 00;44;54;26 - 00;45;32;12 Orville The medicine man or that person was really criticized by religion that they brought with them. So they really knew a lot about language and how to heal people. And I remember my aunt in her 80s, she remember all the [unknown word] and all the other things that went with medicine. And so her and I started to sing in her language at Potlatch, and she got mad at herself because she couldn't remember the words, but yet she had all that knowledge. It's like a library of knowledge. And she was like, you, she's just a PhD in the way she was raised. 00;45;32;13 - 00;45;57;11 Wilson Most of the euro western system that we have to contend with. They don't really look at storytelling like we do. They look at storytelling as, you know, something fun when you gift or leave or store a story with another tribe. It's almost the same as offering your life. It's that serious. 00;45;57;13 - 00;46;23;20 Orville I really am grateful for you sharing with me today. It helped heal me inside because in a lot of these science meetings, I get beat up pretty bad. So it's hurtful with some of the stuff that they say and they don't mean to, they just don't know. And so for me to sit there and learn a little bit about what it was in your country and the way you grew up there with your, your elders, I can see why they gave you that to share. 00;46;23;24 - 00;46;52;03 Wilson Well thank you. Yet a lot of times over the decades in up in Western meetings, in Western stuff, and you get treated with contempt and you get treated with dismissive. They say stuff like, you know, it's anecdotal. And yeah, I just kept plugging away. I just kept going and going. And so it's really a pleasure for me to be able to have like minded people in the conversation. 00;46;52;04 - 00;47;04;24 Orville I was going to do this with somebody and I thought, no, I got to if I'm going to tell it about how we tell stories, it's got to be somebody that grew up like me. It can't be somebody else. So I try, I look for you all over til I found you. 00;47;04;26 - 00;47;06;04 Wilson Yeah, I certainly appreciate it. 00;47;06;06 - 00;47;15;19 Orville You're a doctor in your own right. And you're in your own way for your own people. For me, I'm not there yet. I'm a little bit too young to say anything. 00;47;15;20 - 00;47;18;14 Wilson You'll get there. Like, took me a while. 00;47;18;16 - 00;47;37;14 Orville No, you're you're there. Your people put you there for a reason. I know those people. I know some of them are gone, though. Yeah. Good people. Yeah. 00;47;37;17 - 00;47;40;12 Jessie So what landed with you in that one? 00;47;40;15 - 00;47;54;07 Mike A lot of things. I mean, anytime I hear an elder talk about storytelling and the stories they have and the role it plays in both cultural and language retention and storage and transmission, you know, it hits you. 00;47;54;08 - 00;48;10;18 Jessie And they talked about ownership of stories. You know, we gave it back to them or this is ours to hold and give. Same goes for people like if somebody's the holder of some information about somebody else. The way of that I've seen people like not gossip about it is just say, you know what? That's not mine to tell. 00;48;10;25 - 00;48;33;03 Mike I have definitely learned more about that through the bouncing off of cultures for whom stories are really meaningful. And I can think of recent events where someone's told me something and I'm like, that's not my story to tell. I hold this piece, I'm appreciative of it, but it's certainly not mine to share with someone else when you need to go talk to them if you want to hear that. 00;48;33;04 - 00;49;21;20 Jessie Even with this recording, you know, we we heard seven minutes of it or something. This whole recording was like, I think maybe 45 minutes. There's a lot more in that recording, but I don't feel like it would be okay if I talked about it here, because it's not mine to share and it's not something that they agreed to share. The Alaska Voices Project is it is the sharing of of story through conversation. And as part of that, what we put in the world has to be in collaboration with the people that shared it. So what that means is having a collaborative editing process so that things aren't just pulled from these stories and fragmented and then thrown in the world for people to hear. It's a collaborative process with the people who told the story so they can agree or disagree, and if they disagree, then we respect that. 00;49;21;21 - 00;50;13;09 Mike Right. I do think it does surprise people sometimes, you know, during the editing process about just how collaborative, how much input, how much consent we want before a story ends up on the Alaska Voices website and on the podcast and in a radio show like this, that it does this reflect what you said? Does this reflect what you meant? We've trimmed this long conversation down. Can you confirm that we haven't misrepresented anything, that we haven't accidentally taken something out that we didn't realize was important? All of these stories were shared with everyone and that now you you out there are part of this process and you hold them. Now, you know, there's some responsibility that comes with that of taking these people and what they've shared seriously and integrating it into your life in whatever way is, is valuable. 00;50;13;15 - 00;50;18;16 Mike Thanks for sitting down with me. And you know, you've been with this since the very, very, very, very beginning. 00;50;18;17 - 00;50;37;27 Jessie Thank you. It's always fun to record, and from my perspective, it's been great that the group that you work with has been able to pick it up. And that's part of, from my perspective, starting to build something and then completely fine to hand it off so that it can keep growing and becoming whatever it's supposed to be. And I think that's really fun. 00;50;37;28 - 00;50;47;09 Mike In our next episode of Alaska Voices, we will focus on the theme of home. We'll leave you with a short clip from Margaret Anamaq Rudolph and Julian Dann. 00;50;47;11 - 00;51;36;21 Margaret This is the way my academic career has when it's always been in the Arctic. And so I've always kind of like wondered what it's kind of like in other situations, and I can't really tell how much it's different. Like a sense of the community and the culture, because there's definitely like these different levels where you have people that are researchers that keep their head down, and then there's people that really work within the state or within a particular community or region, and they work pretty closely with that. That kind of depends like if you're very sociable, and I think it also depends where you end up going, but also like your support system, like if you work for an agency, there's that aspect of being a bit more mission driven for certain people's lives of people you talk to. And then there's also this other level within Arctic research, which is the international like, pan Arctic aspect. 00;51;36;24 - 00;52;04;06 Mike Alaska Voices is a place for communities to connect through conversation. This podcast was created with support from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, and was the brainchild of Jessie Young-Robertson and Bob Bolton. The Alaska CASC is committed to providing regionally relevant science for Alaska's changing climate. Alaska Voices would not be possible without the efforts of an amazing group of our producer and audio engineer is Kelsey Skonberg of Mossy Stone media. 00;52;04;12 - 00;52;42;07 Mike The Alaska Voices team includes Micah Hahn at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Lia Ferguson, Mike DeLue, Suzanna Caldwell, Annika Ord, and Georgia Houde at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. We would also like to thank the musicians whose songs we heard today. Our theme is Arctic Evening by Marcel Dupree's. We also played Blue Skies by Holizna and Resolution by Komiku, as well as the following songs with Creative Commons Attribution licenses, Interplanetary Forest, Surreal Forest, rain, Elk and Freezing but Warm by Meydän, all from the Free Music Archive. 00;52;42;08 - 00;52;51;26 Mike If you're interested in more conversations or information, please visit our website at Alaska Voices.org. For Alaska Voices, I'm Mike DeLue.