John L. Jarvis

A writer working out of Canada's capital

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Light rail as a sign of progress

I happened to catch a segment on the Leonard Lopate Show about the upcoming North Carolina primary this afternoon, and this off-hand statement (at approximately 9:28 in the recording, in case you want to skip to it) made me smile:

Charlotte just opened its first light rail... a century behind a lot of northern cities in that respect...

A lot, maybe, but not Ottawa. (Sorry, I couldn't resist. :-) )

Labels: ottawa, public transit

¶ 9:24:00 PM (0) comments

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

On security cameras

A UC Berkeley report on whether security cameras have deterred crime in San Francisco is conclusively inconclusive, according to the mayor. Schneier also commented on the article; unsurprising, as the security camera is a popular target of his security theater argument.

I just finished reading Robert A. Heinlein's Friday, where he speculated that, in the future, monitoring security cameras in 'real-time' would require sampling, in practice; he implied that this was common knowledge, at least amongst criminals, and that they managed their risk accordingly (e.g., they went ahead and played the odds, or destroyed the camera, etc.).

However, the reality that this and other articles reinforce is that all of these decisions - including whether to install security cameras, how many to install, how to operate them, and how to monitor them - are heavily influenced by money. If there's money available, why not install security cameras, just in case, in other words; this, despite the fact that compelling arguments against the collection of unnecessary data have been put forth since the 60s.

Labels: heinlein, psychology, security

¶ 8:10:00 AM (0) comments

Saturday, January 12, 2008

The system sucks

The Lower (formerly No) Impact Man, Colin Beavan, has succinctly expressed my current opinion on the environment in a recent post (that I also shared with you, incidentally): the system sucks. By that, he means that the ruts in the road that we normally follow throughout our lives are not designed with the environment in mind; it's the backdrop, and it's taking a beating, according a body of knowledge (including last year's IPCC report).

The example that's the centrepiece of his post is air travel, and it's also the one that forced me to look long and hard at my life. I realized that for many of the previous years, my lifestyle didn't reflect my opinions; there are all sorts of examples I could list, but by far the most damaging to the environment was my annual air travel.

Colin writes about the incentives to vacation once a year versus, say, going on longer sojourns, much of which could be done over land, and I certainly live in that world. (While he also makes some valid points about business travel, that isn't the world I live in right now.) I would eventually lose my vacation allotment were I to attempt such a drastic change in my lifestyle, so I will go a step farther and say that the system punishes that sort of behaviour.

I love traveling. And while I love the breadth of settings my country offers me - and there are still many parts of it that I have yet to explore - I love traveling far away. I have only just begun to travel the world. I can envision a time when my wife and I will be traveling somewhere warm every year, as we do now, and taking another trip to a far-off locale, in addition to our annual trip 'down East' in the summer (by car). Yes, some years that extra trip will probably be closer to home (e.g., the birthday celebrations in Québec City this year), but I certainly don't want to feel obligated to do that.

That may be selfish, but at this point in my life, I'm O.K. with that. I will use cloth grocery bags, I will buy fair-trade coffee (and drink it out 'n' about if it's served, in my travel mug if I have it, or out of a paper cup if that's the only option), I will take the stairs, I will drive a smaller car, but I will not feel bad when our annual flight down South blows all the carbon dioxide emissions I've managed to save during the previous 364 days; not for one minute.

Some of the examples I've raised bring me to my final point: Colin's right; the system can be changed. I like my analogy of ruts in the road because it communicates how deeply ingrained some of this stuff is, while indicating that it isn't immutable. On the plastic grocery bags, complaining about that in the 80s would've got you some funny looks - acid rain was the only problem in our part of the world back then, in case you weren't aware - and even just a few years ago our mayor lamented the cost of sending our plastic bags to the Far East(!) for recycling when he canned the program. Now most of the grocery stores around my house take them back, and they all sell their own cloth bags. My favourite movie theatre, the Bytowne, sells fair-trade coffee (in disposable cups), and Bridgeheads are popping up all over the place.

The key is to identify the worst behaviours encouraged by the system and make some noise about them. In the time it takes you to put your thoughts down in a forum like this, you could have a strong, personal message for your MP or MPP. (I'm not a big fan of form letters, but that may be because I don't understand the system; there's that word again.) But another key is to identify those more malleable behaviours - the shallow ruts, if you will - that could be influenced by local campaigns and, likely, local spending habits. Even if those changes don't reduce carbon dioxide emissions, I think, in the aggregate, they show people the potential for real rewards from their efforts, and I think that's a message we don't hear enough these days.

Labels: canada, environment, science

¶ 9:55:00 AM (1) comments

Monday, January 07, 2008

Range Voting

I just got around to reading a very informative interview with William Poundstone on voting systems. I still have a lot to learn on this subject (as some have pointed out previously), which may account for my finding the interviewer's style a bit erratic; it was an excellent read otherwise.

Of particular interest to me was the discussion concerning small political parties: in addition to being the fairest voting system - according to a study by mathematician Warren Smith that is referenced throughout the interview - the range voting system also benefits small political parties. The idea is that by assigning each candidate a value in a range (say, from 1 to 10), voters address the 'spoiler effect', or the splitting of votes amongst similar candidates, such that a candidate in clear opposition to them wins the election with less overall support: under a range voting system, voters would be able to assign similar values to similar candidates, or to their favourite (possibly 'fringe') party candidate and the best of the candidates who are likely to win, if you will. This also addresses the concept of 'wasting' one's vote in a first-past-the-post or plurality voting system.

Labels: political system

¶ 4:56:00 PM (2) comments

Monday, December 17, 2007

Musing on Nupedia and 'knol'

My first thought upon reading Google's announcement of its knowledge repository - called 'knol' - was that it's been tried before: Nupedia espoused similar goals before its demise. Subsequent thoughts included:

Writing an article is a lot of work: will the benefits make it worthwhile? (Ad revenue would help with this.) The benefits of name recognition may be tough to quantify before you reach real renown, for example.

A picture and biography of the author raise questions too: playing on their book analogy, I do check the dustcover occasionally, but it's rarely the deciding factor; particularly when I'm looking for an authority on a subject (as opposed to reading for pleasure, for example): the calibre and number of recommendations, followed by the quality of the writing are much more important to me. Also, I tend to agree with the criticism of journalists who include their pictures next to their newspaper articles: shouldn't the writing speak for itself? (Although, admittedly, this does seem fairly innocuous nonetheless.)

The circumstances surrounding Nupedia leave me of two minds: one could say that Wikipedia's rise detracted from Nupedia by offering a potentially less time-consuming means of contributing. However, one could also say that Wikipedia's rise brought attention to open knowledge in general, and that experts would quickly recognize what many more people have since: there are limits to the utility of articles that are perpetually open to modification by all; a sister site with Nupedia's philosophy could be attractive to that community of experts.

Whether Nupedia implemented that philosophy is open to debate. Certainly, and I say this with a tinge of irony, its Wikipedia article details a number of flaws. For my own part, I was content to copyedit articles in my subject area of computer science, so I have difficulty believing that experts suffering comments from anonymous reviewers with no knowledge of the subject area was endemic or little more than 'growing pains', as it were. Again, I know I had doubts as to whether I would be accepted as a CS reviewer with only a BCS to my name.

I'll be watching 'knol' with great interest. In addition to the tarnish Wikipedia has accumulated in recent years, the other, probably far more significant, circumstance associated with knol's introduction is its sponsor, and the enormous buzz that comes with it. Many will rightly say that if Google can't do this, no one can for the foreseeable future.

Labels: journalism, knowledge

¶ 9:41:00 AM (0) comments

Monday, November 26, 2007

More on the public's perceptions: nanotechnology

I've written about the disconnect between the fears of the public and those of the experts before. A report published yesterday focuses on nanotechnology, and as one might expect, one of the only significant sources of public concern regarding it related to surveillance devices: a favourite bogeyman of the mass media and privacy advocates alike (although, admittedly, their complaints normally focus on the macro devices, as it were).

Still, I don't know that I would've ranked any of the subtopics in the article as a concern; yet another research topic, I guess.

Update: December 3: Building a Safe Nanotechnology Future, and, for the truly industrious, Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century sounds like an excellent resource.

Labels: bias, journalism, psychology, science

¶ 11:10:00 PM (0) comments

Saturday, November 24, 2007

The role of deception

I read Flowers for Algernon recently, and Charlie's frustration after seeing a movie with a sappy ending early on in his development - It isn't real! - came to mind as I read this statement in an In Character article on deception and autism: