Last year I was fortunate to get to work with a new team of co-authors on a paper titled “Quantifying minimum mobility needs: the Who, the Where, and the Why.” The project afforded a little space to think about the concept of wellbeing , in particular how it relates to mobility, and to engage with some fascinating early literature on fundamental human needs. This is a new kind of post for me, in…
A parable Imagine you make a new acquaintance through friends, and through a brief conversation learn that the other person shares your love of food and cooking. They invite you to come over one evening for a “home cooked meal,” and you gladly accept! Once you arrive and sit down for dinner, they hand you a plate with some…shapes on it. These shapes look like food, more or less: one seems…
A talk given at the 2021 meeting of the International Symposium for Sustainble Systems and Technology . Slides (PDF, 436 kB) at IIASA PURE Recording on YouTube TeX source and BibTeX citation on GitHub Abstract Large-scale integrated assessment models (IAMs) have become critical knowledge objects and tools for global-scope simulation of energy, economic, engineering, and environmental systems. IAMs…
This post expands on some text from the README of iam-units , in order to illustrate some improved ways to structure data and metadata. These are especially helpful in systems research, where data from multiple disciplines/domains/contexts are often combined. iam-units is a thin wrapper around the very useful pint , that I wrote with some colleagues to handle unit conversions for data from…
In research with global scope and country- or country-group resolution, it's common to handle data with one or more [1] dimension(s) identifying a country (countries) for each observation. Problems can arise when inconsistent identifiers—“United States” vs. “United States of America”—are used to label this dimension, either across different data sets, or within one data set. The best precaution…
Family and friends in Canada and the United States have asked about my situation here in Vienna during the COVID-19 pandemic . This post is for you; I might write another, wonkier one that focuses more on science, (mis)information, and policy. First things first: I'm fine! Timeline 2011–2017 During grad school, I was lucky to travel to China a number of times; live in Beijing for half of 2013; and…
As a Technology & Policy Program student, you need to prepare a research thesis for your S.M.; if you're in another MIT graduate program, you will likely also need to prepare a thesis or academic publication at some point during your degree! Why? Compared to Microsoft Word, the LaTeX document preparation system can save you considerable time in writing your thesis, as well as other documents such…
Bloomberg reports : Xin Guobin, the vice minister of industry and information technology [MIIT], said the government is working with other regulators on a timetable to end production and sales [of fossil-fuel powered vehicles]. The move will have a profound impact on the environment and growth of China’s auto industry, Xin said at an auto forum in Tianjin on Saturday. This is, no doubt, a major…
I use LaTeX for my academic work. For some time Atom has been my editor of choice. Over the years, I've migrated through a variety of workflows, including using dedicated editors like LyX to write my S.M. thesis. Atom is not a dedicated LaTeX editor, but it is immensely popular. Consequently it has many useful features and packages that I've found improve my productivity for writing code (LaTeX…
Source: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2006), via Imgur 1 , 2 . Source: Rebecca Cook / Reuters (29 January 2017), via The Atlantic . This is the first time I've seen, in person or a photograph, a poster or billboard containing only a QR code —with no accompanying text. 1 The code contains a link to this clip from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940): One exception was a Google…
Cansplain (v): (not to be confused with mansplain ) to nicely explain something about the United States, to Canadians; vice versa. Within minutes of one another, two people asked me to cansplain executive orders . Donald Trump is signing a lot of these, and people are distressed because they're seeming to do all kinds of terrible things . What are they? You could, of course, read Wikipedia .…
I often feel that I spend too much time engaged in online political discussion. As I do, I'm aware that this likely does little to change political outcomes —who gets elected, and what policies they pursue—that concern me and drew me to those discussions in the first place. This is because: I am stuck in my own communities of like-minded people, and Any other person who stumbles across my posts…
Echoing Robert Stavins , I have only a narrow area of expertise, 1 and it does not include political science. I know that some of the following turns on empirical questions that can be answered with data and rigorous analysis, and that there are researchers trying to do just this. I should, and will, acquaint myself with the knowledge they have produced; but that will be a gradual project. In the…
My American friends, and friends in America, Think about your neighbours—women, the poor, immigrants, Muslims, Latinos, queers, trans people, and others. Think of the people in other countries who depend on U.S. aid, diplomacy and action for their survival or security—including from the threat of climate change. Think of their faces and their names. (If you don't know their names, resolve to learn…
Pokémon GO is sweeping the world, and generating a lot of interesting headlines. Here's one: Holocaust Museum to visitors: Please stop catching Pokémon here Reactions to this—and other stories of Pokémon trainers falling into empty swimming pools, invading their neighbours' back yards, and committing other faux pas—varied. Some joked and punned, while one indignant Facebook commenter demanded to…
"Salvation or Menace" by Chris Turner in The Walrus This is all definitely cause for optimism, especially the degree of agreement among panelists. I was nearly dumbstruck yesterday to read about Patrick Brown stating plainly to the PC Party of Ontario that "Climate change is a fact, It is a threat. It is man made. We have to do something about it, and that something includes putting a price on…
I view my teaching as a process of continual development , in which I seek to become more able to create authentic experiences for my students; respond flexibly to their needs; judiciously incorporate new technology, techniques and research ; and convey to them my passion for the topics I choose to teach. Continual development My graduate student teaching is in the areas of engineering & public…
Following the good advice of an instructor from last term, I am resolving for 2015 to write for 15 minutes every day! To be precise, the advice was to write material with a non-zero probability of appearing in my thesis. I realized that I already do spend more than 15 minutes writing each day, but without much focus. Instead, I comment in various places , or write blurbs to frame articles and…
Reviewed : 1 Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies , W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2014. Hardcover, 320 pp. “The factory of the future will only have two employees, a man, and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” —Warren G. Bennis 3 <!>…
Reviewed : 1 Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know The Answer), Crown Business, New York, 2011. Paperback, 269 pp. plus bibliography, notes and index. Lest we be paralyzed with indecision, we confidently go about our everyday lives making assumptions, reasoning from the few to the many, seeking regularity and choosing, optimistically, to interpret the outcomes of our decisions as…
Source: Feng Li/Getty Images, via The Atlantic ) The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. — Neuromancer , opening lines. <!> The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the…
One of the ways terrorism works—yes—is by provoking a reflexive reaction whereby the targets, out of terror or anger, compromise their values. The availability heuristic leads them to worry that more violence is imminent and that they face a choice between principle and safety. From my untutored perspective, the chief reason terrorism fails is that these reactions—especially revenge—don't tend to…
I am in Beijing, China from 22 February to 15 July this year (with some side-trips) to do research. My institutional host is the 清华大学能源环境经济研究所 ( qīnghuá dàxué néngyuán huánjìng jīngjì yánjiū suǒ , Tsinghua University Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy), and I am mostly funded by the MISTI/MIT-China program . I am subletting a room about a kilometre east of the university. Though I…
Ms Adams, Ms Chow; I grew up in Mississauga, living and voting in Ms Adams' riding; for seven years while attending the University of Toronto, I lived in Ms Chow's. Despite a keen interest in policy and consequent hypersensitivity to politics, this is my first time writing to my Member(s) of Parliament. The occasion is Bill C-38, which may have passed by the time you receive this; nevertheless I…
Source: MarlaYuriko .
[Posting again after yet another year-long hiatus, some site updates, a new comment system, etc.] To test-drive all this, a question: are the ideas of work-life balance and a person's life's work compatible?
Earlier today I made the case that "The Government of Canada" shouldn't be renamed on whim or even deliberately, and using "Canada's New Government" (technically correct in a very narrow sense) or "Harper Government" (mirrors vulgar usage, but inappropriate) rests on dangerously misleading semantics. 1 The next of at least 36 reasons to not vote Conservative in May is one facet of their treatment…
In case you hadn't noticed, I am writing a series of daily posts on ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative this Election Day. This was supposed to be yesterday's post, but was delayed by work. The matter here is fairly simple: for almost two years at the beginning of their time in office, the Conservatives forced public servants to use the phrase Canada's New Government in the place of Government of…
Twice is coincidence—thrice, a trend! 1 This post continues a list of ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative in the 2011 Canadian federal election. In a footnote to yesterday's item on Abousfian Abdelrazik , I lamented that we might never know who was behind denying him diplomatic aid. The failure of Lawrence Cannon to reverse that action was bad enough in itself, but it's still natural to want to…
Who? This guy :   (Images: CBC) He's one of ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative in the May 2 general election. Yesterday was the F-35 . I'm short on time, so this will be a brief post; but it introduces a theme that I can expand on later by talking about Suaad…
Shiny, innit? 1 Nevertheless, the F-35 is one of ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative in the 2011 Canadian general election, and the first post in my daily series. At least part of each item will involve me asserting some kind of authority on the topic, in order to make you receptive to what I say. Sometimes that will be a stretch; in this case, it's not. I have been a fighter jet nerd 2 since I…
By now you've heard that the next federal election will be on Monday, May 2. Despite talk of it being "unwanted", I feel it's long overdue. The first and most important thing is that you should vote . Elections Canada has good information on how to do that. You can vote early, by mail (as I will), or on Election Day itself. In the latter case, you are entitled by law to three hours off work, 100%…
This is the first entry in what will be a regular feature on life in Boston—including Cambridge & MIT —mainly aimed at family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. (you know who you are) from Toronto—including Mississauga & UofT . The title comes from the nicknames Hogtown and Beantown . "Pork & Beans" is also a Weezer tune with a meme-packed music video , and the Bos s ton e musical joke was…
Getting Things GNOME! (well, at least my GSoC branch of it ) is on its way to having a feature-complete DBus interface to its data store and the objects (Tasks and Tags) inside of it, as well as a client-side library. More on that later. This post is a memo of some lessons learned while reading & grokking the entire dbus-python codebase, its still-incomplete tutorial , and trying to make use of it…
Recently I have been working on two things related to achieving a client-server separation in Getting Things GNOME! One is a test suite that will cover all aspects and functionality of the DBus interfaces. The second is low-level code to support the interfaces themselves. Why not do them in sequence? Well, tinkering with the low level code is helping to outline what will and will not be possible…
Some thoughts on the occasion of the G20 summit in Toronto. The police presence and violent protest were both of a scale unprecedented for this city. The security cost, at over $1 billion, was also unprecedented in the history of the G-summits and is unlikely to ever be equalled . Much ink will be shed on the taxonomy of protesters (a term which, apparently, also now includes opportunist vandals…
My fourth Getting Things GNOME! Summer of Code week had four work foci (a trend which will hopefully not continue 'til week 10…) One, I put up some code to the Planet, having been encouraged by good responses to earlier queries . This time I stuck my neck out by proposing something larger, and in short order was told three new things to consider—for example, the mixin concept . With this input, I…
DBus is great, and so is Python—each for their own reasons. One mismatch is that everything passing over the bus must be a message or signal . You wind up with Python code that looks like proxyobject.SetThis('foo') bar = proxyobject.GetThat() proxyobject.DoSomeOtherStuff() But then you realize the dbus-python binding is very Pythonic, so you can extend it in a Pythonic way. Here's something I…
The third week of my Summer of Code project (separating client and server parts of Getting Things GNOME!) was a busy one. In some long but well-reasoned discussion on the gtg-contributors mailing list, we reached consensus that the GTG data model will add task duration, and drop an older kind of task ID in favour of UUID s. The duration field will let users estimate how long it will take them to…
Following on my last week's work mapping the Getting Things GNOME! data model , week 2 of my GSoC experience involved preparing this somewhat-lengthy analysis of how we store tasks in GTG, and how it should change. Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to things like the 168-page iCalendar RFC …of which a good ten percent is devoted to the recurrence specification grammar for VEVENTs and VTODOs.…
Hello, Planet GNOME! I'm Paul Kishimoto, working this summer on Getting Things GNOME! as part of Google's Summer of Code. You've already heard from Luca and Karlo , my partners in crime coding. To complement both Karlo's web-based interface to GTG (which will let you access your tasks from anywhere) and Luca's multi-backend overhaul (which will let you store them anywhere), I will be working on a…
Recently several people have expressed frustration, within hearing range, over infuriating actions of large companies. For example, Apple's practice of generating excessive hype for unremarkable hardware by applying a spot of polish and a kiloton of marketing. Aggressive lawsuits and patent trolling are another instance. Attacks on the reputability of excellent sources of journalism are a third.…
I have almost finished reading the brilliant book Beyond Growth by the economist Herman Daly . It is worth quoting at length: We have three economic problems to consider: allocation, distribution and scale. Allocation refers to the apportioning of resources among alternative product uses—food, bicycles, cars, medical care. An allocation is efficient if it corresponds to effective demand, that is,…
I stumbled across a short but fascinating work by the 19 th -century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called variously the The Art of Controversy or The Art of Being Right . Wikisource has one version ; another site has what seems to be the same English text alongside the original German . Read it in full! His topic is controversial dialectic: …the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way…
Some time ago I stumbled across the following: Whoops, no Flash? Despite the objections of purists and the present high cost, it's clear that this is the way of the future. Reviews point out the sophistication of the electronic control; for example, the cages adjust slightly when cross-shifted (an outer gear at the crank and an inner gear at the rear cassette, or vice versa) to eliminate the…
To avoid the taint of modernity, I'll lie and say that a friend once remarked , apropos of nothing, "'Welcome' mat in an empty field." Some weeks later, I was walking behind the University of Toronto Press warehouse on Dufferin when I saw the item in question. It was about noon early in the summer, before the oppressive, July-August Toronto heat scorched the colour out of the city. There was a…
At the risk of stating the obvious, democratic government is unlike running a business in a number of important ways. David Olive gives one of the similarities in his excellent blog at the Toronto Star: It is the death of any commercial enterprise to starve itself of necessary expenditures on R&D, new-product development and marketing. I'll never understand how today's conservatives fail to make…
The May issue of The Walrus contained this article by Daniel Stoffman. An illustrative quote: Because they are amateurs, homegrown terrorists prefer soft, undefended targets — a restaurant rather than a military installation, a bus rather than a hydro dam. And because they are part of the community, they are hard to detect. “We have cases of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants converting to the most…
I have been involved in a number of small organizations in which I held either explicit or de facto roles as a director of communications or webmaster. These include the Iron Dragons , the University of Toronto Engineering Society , the Leaders of Tomorrow Working Group (WG) for Engineering Science and later the Graduate WG, as well as project groups for several courses. As a web development…
Public policy is a growing personal interest, building on my background in engineering, my morbid fixation with local, provincial and federal politics, and a view for leadership. This term I have a fascinating graduate course in Engineering & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. While much of the material would likely cause the reader's eyes to glaze over, I hope to write about some…