larry borsato

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.

In today’s New York Times, Sherry Turkle of M.I.T. decries our substitution of “conversation by technology” for actual conversation. We prefer the controlled, editable, deletable world of texting and Facebook to the messy world of actually talking to others. She refers to it, describes in the paragraph above, as the Goldilocks Effect.

We like the world of social technology because we can share what we want to yet still retain ultimate control. As Sherry suggests, we are able to present our best faces at all times, able to hide that which we don’t want others to see. The messy bits of ourselves. And it is those messy bits that seem to fall out so openly in conversation, from simple grammatical errors to the annoying faux pas that we so often succumb to.

I spend a lot of time working in coffee shops. By that I mean sitting cross-legged in a comfy chair at Starbucks with a computer balanced on my lap, coffee at my side. And I like to watch people. I see people glued to their laptops, earbuds in their ears, phones at the ready for an occasional text or two. These people are in their own worlds; they actively avoid conversation. I’m guilty of it too, being completely absorbed in what I am doing, clearly uninterested in conversing with others around me.

But once in a while, I’ll start up a conversation with someone sitting nearby, or someone will start one with me, and what was previously two solitudes becomes a vibrant discussion, seemingly enjoyed by both of us. It doesn’t take much to get started.

Perhaps we are all just willing conversationalists waiting inside. We’ve just forgotten how to get started. Maybe all we need is a little push.

The Region of Waterloo, Canada, where I live, is planning to build a contentious light rail transit plan. Actually it isn’t so much a plan as a straight run that links two shopping malls and passes through the downtown core, where there really isn’t much business.

They keep talking like that anyway, but it’s really all about downtown development and increasing property tax revenues. Even the local paper makes it clear:

Council approved the controversial $818-million rail transit system last June. It’s a redevelopment plan to draw homes and jobs to central neighbourhoods. Residents will see electric trains on the streets of Kitchener and Waterloo by 2017 and enhanced buses in Cambridge by 2014. (emphasis mine)

But the big fight now is about who will run the thing. Local politicians have decided it should be a private company. Of course some people, as well as unions predictably, have a problem with this, demanding that it remain in public hands. As Peter Shawn Taylor notes, they seem to be aiming for the worst possible situation:

As clever as this may be, however, the staff report then appears to undo all these benefits. To ensure labour peace, it suggests the region unilaterally set wage rates for private operators and/or allow labour rates to be passed directly on to taxpayers as what it calls a “flow though cost.” This presents the worst of all possible worlds. Private sector contractors would have no incentive to keep wages low and the region would be on the hook for ever-rising labour costs.

Kevin Thomason also notes that:

“We need a world-class system here in Waterloo, not the cheapest system possible.”

While I have no idea what a world class system means – and by the way we’re talking about a community of 500,000 people here, not some huge metropolis – I would put money on that fact that no matter what, we won’t be getting the cheapest anything.

But back to the private versus public question again. Apparently there is a report that shows that a private partner is much better. You’ll just have to trust them though because the report is secret:

A regional report says an expert partner will save taxpayers 18 per cent over 33 years while reducing taxpayer risks by 62 per cent. That’s based on a secret value-for-money audit that regional government refuses to release, saying it belongs to the consultant who wrote it.

I assume the region paid the consultant for the report, but it belongs to the consultant. Years in business and that’s the first time I heard that one. I wonder if the councillors even got to read it? And we may never know what is in the contract either:

Regional chief administrator Mike Murray warned that parts of a transit contract may also be kept secret, saying this could include confidential information supplied to regional government by a partner.

So basically, this is what passes for political leadership where I live:

Trust us.

Yup. Can’t see a problem with that at all. Because they’ve been so upfront so far.

After being President of the United States for almost four years, President Obama still refuses to release his college transcripts (via I Hate The Media):

Ed Henry, FOX News: “I don’t know how many years, maybe you do, George Romney released of his college transcripts, but Republicans like to complain that the President has not released his college transcripts. What is the stated reason for that?”

Jay Carney, White House: “I would refer you to the campaign.

The man already has the job. At this point, even if he was a C student, what is the harm in releasing the transcripts?

I am most surprised by the media. As Chelsea Schilling at WND notes, they have had no problem going after former presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican, so why the reticence here? For example, I know that George Bush was a C student. So what? And how could they be considered racist for treating the first black president the same way as they treated all of the presidents before him?

I’m also surprised at the number of people who repeat the fact that President Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, though I couldn’t easily find independent confirmation of this. And as noted here:

Just because he graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude doesn’t mean BO had a high GPA. It just means that after subtracting the students who graduated summa cum laude, of the remaining students, he graduated in the top 10% of his class. Theoretically, he could have had a C average.

Really, why not just release everything and stop fanning the flames? Wouldn’t that stop all of the Republican conspiracy theorists dead in their tracks, and demonstrate that Obama was a man with nothing to hide? That’s a good thing, right?

Years ago, the Dean of my Engineering faculty told me that two years out of school nobody cares what your marks are, but instead they look at what you have accomplished. So why not just release the transcripts and whatever other information there is, and just put an end to the controversy?

And to those of you who would say that “it is none of my business” or “he doesn’t need to”, you are correct. But the ostensibly most powerful person in the free world owes it to their citizens to be honest and upfront with them. Sharing basic information like this goes a long way toward that goal.

What’s wrong with this paragraph in an editorial in The Record?

Cures for addiction are seldom pretty. And the cure for a government addicted to overspending is surely so. Drummond appears poised to prescribe massive budget cuts in most provincial ministries — some as deep as 30 per cent — over the next five years. The reins of restraint will tug sharply on health and education spending, too. While McGuinty has planned to scale back the yearly increments in health care funding to three per cent, Drummond says that’s not good enough. He’s pushing for annual increases of just 2.5 per cent, which means hospitals would have to make do with hundreds of millions of dollars less every year.

I’ve given you a hint by highlighting it. For the casual reader, The Record would like to suggest that by lowering the percentage increase in healthcare spending, the government is cutting spending by millions.

For the innumerate among us, an increase means that hospitals will still have millions more to spend – just not as many extra millions as they previously anticipated. The government is not cutting the healthcare budget by any stretch of the imagination, no matter what The Record would have you believe.

This attempt to mislead should not be confused with unbiased journalism, and I’m not the first to notice:

Increasing spending at a rate in line with economic growth and inflation is not a “cut.” A cut is a reduction, not an increase at a lower rate than hoped. Language is the first casualty of politics. The proposed restraints by Minister Flaherty are, well, sensible, so far as anything in the upside down world of socialized medicine can be described as “sensible.”

Newspapers seem to depend on the casual scan of a column, combined with a poor understanding or numbers, to arouse outrage in readers. This does nothing to contribute to the intelligent discussion that is required to solve the problems we face.

But I suppose it sells papers.

I came upon this site via a Twitter link today, but I’m really not sure if it is serious, or just some sort of very bad joke. Teaching For Change is apparently an organization that, in their own words, seeks to to transform America into a more “equitable, multicultural society” by implementing “social justice” education in K-12 schools.

Now I always have a problem with the term social justice, if only because I just don’t understand who the final arbiters are or what constitutes justice. But as I read I was stunned by this assertion:

Proceeding from the premise that the United States is a country rife with racism and discrimination against nonwhite minorities, this Initiative “embrace[s] an anti-racism/anti-oppression approach” that promotes “curricul[a], environments, programs, policies and standards that are equitable, culturally-responsive and linguistically consistent with the diverse communities served by our profession.” [emphasis added]

Having lived and worked in the United States I know it isn’t perfect, but I doubt that it would help to start from that premise. But that wasn’t nearly as troubling as this:

TFC also co-sponsors the Zinn Education Project, which incorporates into classroom curricula the writings of the late historian Howard Zinn—especially his best-selling book A People’s History of the United States. This Marxist tract describes America as a predatory and repressive capitalist state that serves only the interests of wealthy white men who exploit workers, American Indians, slaves, women, blacks, and populists. [emphasis added]

Again, this is a bit incendiary, and not entirely true. The last time I looked the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the free world wasn’t a wealthy white man, but was indeed a black man.

It seems to me that teaching children that wealthy, white men are inherently bad regardless of how they earned their money, while everyone else is inherently good teaches something other than justice, social or otherwise. The idea of pitting different types of people against each other, or arbitrarily assigning sweeping generalized values of good and evil to entire classes or people, and teaching children to do so from an early age, serves no one.

Perhaps if we just get back to teaching our kids to read, write, and to think critically for themselves, they can make their own value judgements, rather than regurgitate the values or those who have gotten us to the point we’re at now.

Our only possible chance for the future may lie in kids who can think for themselves. Let’s leave them with a fighting chance.

I love words. I’ve always had an affinity for words; knowing them, defining them, and using them, especially in unusual ways. I enjoy using 50 cent words as we called them when we were kids – those big words that people rarely use – secure in the knowledge that I also knew the simpler way to say the same thing. And I’ve always enjoyed adding to my vocabulary and playing with words with friends (though I don’t actually play Words With Friends).

I’ll credit my parents for helping me to develop that skill; they taught me to read by reading the newspaper, and my family have always been voracious readers.

Sadly, my idea of humor is often to note that when someone says that “their head is literally exploding”, that they actually mean to say that their head is exploding “figuratively” rather than “literally”, though it was actually a friend who started that one. (At least I hope that they mean figuratively; it is far less messy.) And another friend and I play a game where we converse using as many linguistically similar words in a row as we can. Ok, I don’t get out much.

So I was pleased that the very first thing I read this year was a New York Times article about Wordnik, an online dictionary that defines and offers usage for everything, rather than just those words accepted by lexicographers:

No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.

Then, when you search for a word, Wordnik shows the information it has found, with no editorial tinkering. Instead, readers get the full linguistic Monty.

My test word (yes, I actually have a test word) is irregardless. We all learned at one point or another that irregardless is not an accepted English word, being instead an improper way of saying regardless, but Wordnik defines it nonetheless. Strangely, as the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011 suggests, several otherwise reputable journalistic organizations didn’t seem to get that particular memo and use the word anyway, so it’s probably a good idea that it is well defined.

To me, vocabulary is fun, and it is an admirable goal to expand one’s vocabulary. And Wordnik, especially their Word of the Day via email, is a fun way to do that, as well as an excellent reference in general. You don’t need to use 50 cent words, but knowing them certainly doesn’t hurt.

The Department of Energy has awarded a $230,000 contract for the creation of a green energy jobs website – with no actual jobs:

The Department of Energy has awarded a $230,000 contract to the Association of Energy Services Professionals to develop a website on energy efficiency jobs — but the agency has prohibited the listing of actual position openings.

Instead, the website will include information on what training and education is needed to nab a job, said Suzanne Jones, AESP’s vice president of marketing. In lieu of a job bank, AESP will provide 40 to 50 “very distinct” job descriptions in the energy efficiency industry, along with the education and training needed for such jobs.

At a time when you can start a company on your credit card, only the government could possibly think that it costs anywhere near $230,000 to create a simple website. Of course, when the same government thinks that $533,000 of stimulus money per job saved or created seems like a good deal, that seems about right.

Just think about it. $230,000 would very comfortably pay two employees for a year, with plenty left over. if the site does launch in April, it will have done so at a cost of over $50,000 per month. For a website.

Next time give me a call. I promise I’ll give you a better deal.

Tip of the hat to I Hate The Media.

You may have “text neck“:

First, too much texting caused some people to come down with painful Blackberry Thumb. Now today’s technology is being blamed for another malady: text neck.

Doctors and chiropractors say people hunched over their mobile gadgets are developing neck strain, headaches and pain in the shoulders and, sometimes, in arms and hands. What’s more, all that curving of the body to text, type, watch videos and play games could cause debilitating pain that lasts a lifetime, they warn.

“This is a global epidemic,” says Dean L. Fishman, a chiropractor who practices at the Text Neck Institute in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He trademarked Text Neck and changed the name of his practice after noticing 90 percent of his patients coming in with the same complaint. His youngest patient is a 3-year-old, who’s in love with playing games on an electronic device.

Yet another malady to complain about. It seems that we find some problem in everything we do. As my father always says, everything in moderation. If you’re doing it so much that it hurts, then stop.

Of course, this may be all the exercise some people get.

Is it a fee?

“I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees. What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign, similar to how the dairy producers have created the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign,” he said. “That said, USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action.”

Or is it a tax?

The new program was set to go into effect Wednesday. According to the Agriculture Department announcement, the government would have imposed a 15-cent-per-tree charge on “producers and importers” of fresh Christmas trees, provided they sell or import more than 500 trees a year.

Either way, adding a fee/tax to Christmas trees is just about the dumbest way possible to improve their image via a marketing campaign.

I, like most people, love the idea of a fresh cut Christmas tree. But we don’t love the idea of needles everywhere, having to constantly water it, and having to get rid of it after Christmas. Last Christmas we broke down and bought a beautiful pre-lit Christmas tree. And that will do the job just fine until grandchildren come along and my wife makes me but a fresh-cut tree for them.