Our offices will be moving to this new space. I’m looking forward to actually working in a green building, in addition to developing green building policies.
The Jarvis Street project will set the benchmark for how the province manages its own building retrofits. The eight-month-old Green Energy Act requires Ontario government and broader public-sector buildings to meet a minimum LEED Silver standard – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Jarvis Street will also be used to promote an internal culture of conservation, and to demonstrate the province’s commitment to technologically advanced workspaces that are accessible, flexible and that foster staff collaboration and creativity, Ms. Robinson explains.
I spend a fair bit of time with a locked-down Windows XP machine. Fortunately, I’m able to install Emacs which provides capabilities that I find quite helpful. I’ve had to reinstall Emacs a few times now. So, for my own benefit (and perhaps your’s) here are the steps I follow:
Download EmacsW32 patched and install in my user directory under Apps
The CaGBC maintains a list of all the registered LEED projects in Canada. This is a great resource, but rather awkward for analyses. I’ve copied these data into a DabbleDB application with some of the maps and tabulations that I frequently need to reference.
Here for example is a map of the density of LEED projects in each province. While here is a rather detailed view of the kinds of projects across provinces. There are several other views available. Are there any others that might be useful?
I was given an opportunity to propose a measure to clarify how and on what basis the federal government allocates funds to STI - a measure that would strengthen relations between the federal government and the STI community by eliminating misunderstandings and suspicions on this point. In short, my proposal was that Ottawa direct its Science, Technology and Innovation Council to do three things:
To provide an up-to-date description of how these allocation decisions have been made in the past;
A good read on the mathematics of scaling in urban patterns. I had looked into using the Bettencourt paper (cited in this article) for making allocation decisions. The trick is moving from the general patterns observed in urban scaling to specific recommendations for where to invest in new infrastructure. This is particularly challenging in the absence of good, detailed data on the current infrastructure stock. We’ve made good progress on gathering some of this data, and it might be worth revisiting this scaling relationship.
I’m certain that paying attention to where my food comes from is important. Food production influences my health, has environmental consequences, and affects both urban and rural design. Ideally, I would develop relationships with local farmers, carefully choose organic produce, and always consider broad environmental impacts. Except, I like to spend time with my young family, try to get some exercise, and have more than enough commitments through work to actually spend this much effort on food choices. So, I’ve outsourced this process to the excellent Mama Earth Organics.
Our minister of science continues to argue that his unwillingness to endorse the theory of evolution is not relevant to science policy. As quoted by the Globe and Mail:
My view isn’t important. My personal beliefs are not important.
I find this amazing. How can the minister of science’s views on the fundamental unifying theory of biology not be important?
I don’t expect him to understand the details of evolutionary theory or to have all of his personal beliefs vetted and religious views muted. However, I do expect him – as minister – to champion and support Canadian science, especially basic research. When our minister refuses to acknowledge the fundamental discoveries of science, our reputation is diminished.
Death
Sentences
by Don Watson is a wonderful book – simultaneously funny, scary, and
inspiring – that describes how “clichés, weasel words, and
management-speak” are infecting public language.
The humour comes from Watson’s acerbic commentary and fantastic scorn
for phrases like:
Given the within year and budget time flexibility accorded to the
science agencies in the determination of resource allocation from
within their global budget, a multi-parameter approach to
maintaining the agencies budgets in real terms is not appropriate.
After seventeen years as a vegetarian, I recently switched back to an
omnivore. My motivation for not eating meat was environmental, since,
on average, a vegetarian diet requires much less land, water, and
energy. This is still the right motivation, but over the last year or
so I’ve been rethinking my decision to not eat meat.
My concern was that I’d stopped paying attention to my food choices
and a poorly considered vegetarian diet can easily yield a bad
environmental outcome. In particular, modern agriculture now takes
10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of
food. This is clearly unsustainable. We cannot rely on
non-renewable, polluting resources for our food, nor can we continue
to transport food great distances – even if it is only vegetables.
My unexamined commitment to a vegetarian diet was no longer consistent
with environmental sustainability.
Instapaper is an integral part of my web-reading routine. Typically, I have a few minutes early in the morning and scattered throughout the day for quick scans of my favourite web sites and news feeds. I capture anything worth reading with Instapaper’s bookmarklet to create a reading queue of interesting articles. Then with a quick update to the iPhone app this queue is available whenever I find longer blocks of time for reading, particularly during the morning subway ride to work or late at night.
Like most Canadians, I’ll be at the polls today for the 2008 Federal Election.
In the past several elections, I’ve cast my vote for the party with the best climate change plan. The consensus among economists is that any credible plan must set a price on carbon emissions. My personal preference is for a predictable and transparent price to influence consumer spending, so I favour a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade. Enlightening discussions of these issues are available at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Jeffrey Simpson’s column at the Globe and Mail, or his book Hot Air.
In this article Nassim Nicholas Taleb applies his Black Swan idea to the current financial crisis and describes the strengths and weaknesses of econometrics.
For us the world is vastly simpler in some sense than the academy, vastly more complicated in another. So the central lesson from decision-making (as opposed to working with data on a computer or bickering about logical constructions) is the following: it is the exposure (or payoff) that creates the complexity —and the opportunities and dangers— not so much the knowledge ( i.e., statistical distribution, model representation, etc.). In some situations, you can be extremely wrong and be fine, in others you can be slightly wrong and explode. If you are leveraged, errors blow you up; if you are not, you can enjoy life.
The core of any government reflects the personality of the prime minister, because everyone in the system responds to his or her ways of thinking, personality traits, political ambitions and policy preferences. Know the prime minister; know the government.
Harper has been an enigma and learning more about his personal policies and approach to governance is very useful while thinking about the upcoming election.
Reading up on the upcoming Polaris Music Prize reminded me of Patrick Watson, last year’s winner of the prize. His “Close to Paradise” album is inventive with intriguing lyrics, unique sounds, and an often driving piano track. Particular stand out tracks are Luscious Life, Drifters, and The Great Escape. The album is well worth considering and I’m looking forward to listening to the short-listed artists for this year’s prize.
As a result of actions taken in Budget 2007, Canada’s marginal effective tax rate (METR) on new business investment improved from third-highest in the G7 to third-lowest by 2011.
Fair enough, tax rates are projected to decline. But notice how they phrase the context of this reduction. Moving from third highest to third lowest is, in a list of seven countries, a change from third to fifth. Not a dramatic change – we were near the middle and we still are.
TVO’s The Agenda had an interesting show on the debate between evolutionary biology and creationism. Jerry Coyne provided a great overview of evolution and a good defence during the debate.
The debate offered a great illustration of the intellectual vacuity that characterises creationism (aka intelligent design). Paul Nelson offers up an article by Doolittle and Bapteste as proof that Darwinism is unravelling. I suspect he hopes no one will read past the abstract to discover the reasonable debate scientists are having about the universality of a single tree of life. He certainly doesn’t want you to notice that the entire article is couched within evolutionary theory and not once does it claim that Darwinism has been falsified.
Note – This post has been updated from 2007-03-20 to describe new installation instructions.
Overview
I’ve integrated Stikkit into most of my workflow and am quite happy with the results. However, one missing piece is quick access to Stikkit from the command line. In particular, a quick list of my undone todos is quite useful without having to load up a web browser.
To this end, I’ve written a Ruby script for interacting with Stikkit. As I mentioned, my real interest is in listing undone todos. But I decided to make the script more general, so you can ask for specific types of stikkits and restrict the stikkits with specific parameters. Also, since the stikkit api is so easy to use, I added in a method for creating new stikkits.
Most of my updates arrive through feeds to NetNewsWire. Since my main source of national news and analysis is the Globe and Mail, I’m quite happy that they provide many feeds for accessing their content. The problem is that many news stories are duplicated across these feeds. Furthermore, tracking all of the feeds of interest is challenging.
The new Yahoo Pipes offer a solution to these problems. Without providing too much detail, pipes are a way to filter, connect, and generally mash-up the web with a straightforward interface. I’ve used this service to collect all of the Globe and Mail feeds of interest, filter out the duplicates, and produce a feed I can subscribe to. Nothing fancy, but quite useful. The pipe is publicly available and if you don’t agree with my choice of news feeds, you are free to clone mine and create your own. There are plenty of other pipes available, so take a look to see if anything looks useful to you. Even better, create your own.
I find it useful to have a list of my unfinished tasks generally, but subtley, available. To this end, I’ve added my unfinished todos from Stikkit to my Gmail web clips. These are the small snippets of text that appear just above the message list in GMail.
All you need is the subscribe link from your todo page with the ‘not done’ button toggled. The url should look something like:
My experiences helping people manage their data has repeatedly shown that databases are poorly understood. This is well illustrated by the rampant abuses of spreadsheets for recording, manipulating, and analysing data.
Most people realise that they should be using a database, the real issue is the difficulty of creating a proper database. This is a legitimate challenge. Typically, you need to carefully consider all of the categories of data and their relationships when creating the database, which makes the upfront costs quite significant. Why not just start throwing data into a spreadsheet and worry about it later?
I like to believe that my brain is useful for analysis, synthesis, and creativity. Clearly it is not proficient at storing details like specific dates and looming reminders. Nonetheless, a great deal of my mental energy is devoted to trying to remember such details and fearing the consequences of the inevitable “it slipped my mind”. As counselled by GTD, I need a good and trustworthy system for removing these important, but distracting, details and having them reappear when needed. I’ve finally settled in on the new product from values of n called Stikkit.
I grabbed this image while preparing a new Windows machine. This seems to be an interesting comparison of the difference in design approaches between Apple and PC remotes. Both provide essentially the same functions. Clearly, however, one is more complex than the other. Which would you rather use?
Prior to general release, plantae is moving web hosts. This seems like a good time to point out that all of plantae’s code is hosted at Google Code. The project has great potential and deserves consistent attention. Unfortunately, I can’t continue to develop the code. So, if you have an interest in collaborative software, particularly in the scientific context, I encourage you to take a look.
I recently helped someone process a text file with the help of Unix command line tools. The job would have been quite challenging otherwise, and I think this represents a useful demonstration of why I choose to use Unix.
In this case the only important information is the second number of each line that begins with “sample:”. Of course, one option is to manually process the file, but there are thousands of lines, and that’s just silly.
The Stern Review has been in the news recently for predicting that global warming could cost up to $7 trillion if not addressed soon. Of course, this has caused quite a stir as it offsets many of the, likely unfounded, concerns that fixing climate change will cost too much. The full report is available online and should be a quite interesting, if long, read.
This article in the Guardian explores the use of public relations firms by big oil companies to fight against the science of climate change. Apparently, the same tactics and people even of the tobacco industry’s fight against the link between smoking and cancer are being employed by the oil industry.
Choosing appropriate software tools can be challenging. Here are the principles I employ when making the decision:
Simple: This seems obvious, but many companies fail here. Typically, their downfall is focussing on a perpetual increase in feature quantity. I don’t evaluate software with feature counts. Rather, I value software that performs a few key operations well. Small, focussed tools result in much greater productivity than overly-complex, all-in-one tools. 37 Signals’ Writeboard is a great example of a simple, focussed tool for collaborative writing.
Open formats: I will not choose software that uses proprietary or closed data formats. Closed formats cause two main difficulties:
Since I’m looking for work, I found this post rather interesting. They’ve applied a spam filter to resumes to automatically filter through candidates. The output is only as good as the reference resumes used to construct the filter, but still an intriguing idea. My results are below. Most importantly the probability of me not being hired is 1.15e-59, which is a very, very small number. Perhaps I should add this fact to my resume?
