Tag Archives: Philosophy and Politics

Democracy as a “Big Stick”

If you seek to strike fear into the hearts and minds of American citizens, simply mention that something is a threat to American democracy, regardless of whether such a comment makes any realistic sense.

The Seattle Times today features an editorial on “Ill effects of a gated cyber world“. In it, there are two passages that really got my attention, both mentioning the seeming downfall of democracy should corporate providers be allowed to put in place paid mechanisms for providing faster downloads:

If computer-network providers are allowed to hijack the Internet, the damage will go much deeper than the consumers’ wallets. Democracy will be at risk with the inevitable limiting of voices if Internet neutrality is not ensured.

AT&T and other network providers such as Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are pushing Congress to strike any language from the new telecom bill — the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006 — that would eliminate the ability to charge extra for the speedy service available to all currently on those networks. Here is what will happen if the network companies prevail: Internet customers would pay additional fees to have Web sites and other services that use the network, download nearly instantaneously, while Web sites for customers who do not pay extra would download slower.

[…]

The biggest loser in a gated cyber world would be American democracy. Democracy is already suffering from the effects of consolidation, especially in the media where only a handful of companies either own outright or own interests in films, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, book publishing, and any other media channel that can be devoured.

The author’s point here is very valid – that adding a fee to ensure that a user always gets faster download speeds than everyone else is problematic and runs counter to how the Internet operates today, but to call it a threat to American democracy is laughable. The author forgets that, while U.S. corporations certainly do hold a high stake in the Internet, that the Internet is a global force, not one confined merely to U.S. borders. In fact, it has no borders – the Internet is an ephemeral cloud which users all over the world utilize to find information and connect to other people. To call anything regarding the Internet, regardless of whether it has to do with the American corporations that control those resources, a “threat to American democracy” is incredibly myopic and hegemonic. The Internet simply does not work that way. To claim otherwise fails to consider the big picture.

Building Reputations Online

I’m currently a member of LinkedIn, a social networking service for professionals that targets executive-level professionals primarily but is open to anybody. I’m also (in passing) a member of OpenBC — a more internationally focused version of the LinkedIn concept. Between the two, my time is most definitely spent on LinkedIn, primarily because I have no real international connections. I’m also a member of Facebook and MySpace, though I don’t use either of those seriously either.

On the non-social networking side, I’m also a member of eBay. What do these five sites have in common? They all provide tools to network with other people (though eBay is really more about commercial transactions, it is still fundamentally networking). In addition, they also all provide a method to build an online reputation. eBay is the most obvious of these, since it provides its users with the ability to rate a transaction as positive, neutral, or negative – the more positive-rated transactions you have, the better off you are when you attempt to purchase or sell. The second most obvious one is LinkedIn, which, in a way, measures reputation by how many connections you maintain.

But is that really what LinkedIn connections mean? Not necessarily – in fact, in my case, that’s not really true at all. My strategy on LinkedIn is precisely this: connect with as many people as possible when I feel that having that connection would be beneficial to my work and future goals. Along the way, this has provided me with an opportunity to converse with several interesting people and to engage in conversations that were personally enriching. But none of this was based on my reputation – instead, it was based on my interest for their field of work and my desire to ask questions.

So what is an online reputation, really? I’m buidling one right now by typing this, and I will certainly be judged by my past posts, some of which are not always professional (this is a personal blog, after all). My tentative answer is this: your online reputation is definitely an extension of your real-world reputation, but only insofar as people know about your online work. I have a good reputation with a number of people offline who know nothing about my work online and cannot be influenced by it because of that, so the two are separate entities. This is certainly an open question, and one I’m considering as I utilize LinkedIn to grow a network.

A Ridiculous Amount of Safety

The New York Times talks today about investment going into New Orleans to protect it from future Category Five hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina has certainly made a few records and turned several million heads; it is the rallying cry for the rebuilding of one of this nation’s most culturally diverse and festive cities. There are competing interests here, but none stands to waste taxpayer money as much as protecting New Orleans from Category Five hurricanes.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale defines a Category Five hurricane as follows:

Winds greater than 155 mph (135 kt or 249 km/hr). Storm surge generally greater than 18 ft above normal. Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings. Some complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away. All shrubs, trees, and signs blown down. Complete destruction of mobile homes. Severe and extensive window and door damage. Low-lying escape routes are cut by rising water 3-5 hours before arrival of the center of the hurricane. Major damage to lower floors of all structures located less than 15 ft above sea level and within 500 yards of the shoreline. Massive evacuation of residential areas on low ground within 5-10 miles (8-16 km) of the shoreline may be required.

— The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale
Accessed November 28, 2005

Now, The New York Times reports that citizens of New Orleans are insisting upon a newer, better protection system that will ensure that the city remains intact:

Most Category 5 proposals for New Orleans include devices to close seaward passageways like the Rigolets and gates at the mouths of today’s drainage and navigation canals. Jurjen Battjes, a professor of civil engineering at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and an expert on levee systems, said that approach had worked well in his country. “You don’t want to let your enemy invade deeply into your territory,” Professor Battjes said. “Close your fence at the outside.”

Current levees can be made higher and stronger, and any new system might also include internal levees that would prevent a breach in one spot from swamping large stretches of the city, said Thomas F. Wolff, an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University. Levees, Professor Wolff said, are known as “series systems,” which he compared to “Christmas tree lights from the 1950’s – when one goes out, they all go out.”

“For Category 5 Safety, Levees Are Piece of a $32 Billion Pie”
Accessed November 28, 2005

We cannot protect against an undefined threat. Much the same knee-jerk reaction was made after September 11th: products to protect against terrorism and an ongoing drive to secure the country against terrorist threats costs taxpayers untold amounts of money that would be far better invested in, say, paying down the national debt.

New Orleans cannot protect against something that is, by definition, destructive. Certainly, the amount of destruction can be minimized, but with global warming a fast-approaching issue, there is no way of knowing when, where, or how badly the next Category Five hurricane will hit. New Orleans is better off investing in sustainable building practices and a sound evacuation plan for situations where major disasters threaten the city. The same can be said for industrialized nations across the globe. Rather than waste taxpayer money working on a flood protection system that won’t work when it’s absolutely critical, restore what’s there and use the money to redefine what New Orleans means in the eyes of the American public.

High Gas Prices Revisited

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks having high gas prices is good. Reiss makes a good addition to my argument (“Slipping Backwards (and not in a good way)”, October 23, 2005) – he agrees that high gas prices promote innovation:

For years, the [oil] industry’s long-term benchmark was $20 a barrel in today’s dollars; to get a green light, new investments needed to be profitable at that level. Now the industry is counting on prices to settle near $30. Some aggressive CEOs believe they’ll stay as high as $40.

The changing outlook opens horizons – for conventional drilling, sure, but also for alternatives. Some new technologies merely produce more crude. But others tap energy supplies that have nothing to do with black pools under the Middle East.

Here’s hoping we tap sustainable fuels this time, rather than finite resources that we can’t restore without millions of years of effort.

Slipping Backwards (and not in a good way)

I am an outspoken proponent of high gas prices. So, therefore, when NWCN tells me that gas prices are coming back down, I get frustrated.

Why am I against low gas prices? A few reasons, though don’t expect these to be well-explained:

  • Gas fails to reflect “true cost”. “True cost” is my name for what is usually coined “social cost“, or the actual, social consequences of the manufacture and sale of a particular commodity. A good example from the Wikipedia article linked to above:

    Negative externalities (external costs) lead to an over-production of those goods that have a high social cost. For example, the logging of trees for timber may result in society losing a recreation area, shade, beauty, and air quality, but this loss is usually not quantified and included in the price of the timber that is made from the trees. As a result, individual entities in the marketplace have no incentive to factor in these externalities. More of this activity is performed than would be if its cost had a true accounting.

    The same can be said for the production of petroleum; we don’t consider the loss of precious natural resources or the pollution cost in refinement (not to mention social consequences that stem from refinement, the economic costs required to transport petroleum, etc.). If these were accounted for, the cost of gasoline would be much higher.

  • Low gas prices promote fuel-inefficent vehicles. Keeping gas prices low offer no disincentive for the purchase of sport utility vehicles or other cars with very low MPG ratings (sports or “exotic” cars in particular); certainly, while those who can afford an SUV can likely afford higher gas prices, keeping those prices low isn’t likely to make people think about the amount of money they waste on gas instead of taking a number of measures to lower fuel cost.
  • Low gas prices only prolong our dependence on oil. Now, I’m not one of those “we must abolish oil usage yesterday” freaks, though I do believe that we have to conserve our natural resources as best as possible for future generations. The development of alternative energy, whether that be biodiesel, electric vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, or fuel cell vehicles, is a worthwhile exercise in preserving our children’s future. It doesn’t matter where the solution comes from; fuel/electric hybrids are a great first step for transportation, but they are not the end-all of energy problems. They are also only one of many possible solutions.
  • As long as the “panic mentality” of high gas prices is maintained, no progress in bettering the world can be made. The issue of high gas prices affects far more than cars. It also has direct impact on the overall costs of running businesses, the ability of groups to cope with emergencies, and, rather indirectly, the development of community. That last point is a rather interesting one — so long as we can travel far on low gas prices, we aren’t as likely to pursue options that develop community: carpooling, living closer to an urban center, reducing the amount of distance between us and our everyday destinations (work, the grocery store, the bakery, the mall).

I admit, I drive a hybrid; I do this because of some of the reasons above, but also because I like to keep my costs low (and driving a hybrid car does, in fact, help me do this). I hope I will continue to drive hybrids as my primary vehicle for as long as I can drive.

Promising Deadlines Isn’t Promising

Why do we bother to promise that we’ll make deadlines instead of just doing it? The promise wastes time that could be better spent. Thus, the recent promise from the Iraqi government regarding a constitution is useless – promise all you want. I want results.

If you’re wasting your time promising me you’ll meet a deadline, you better sit down and think a little bit about your process…

Teaching Philosophies

I’ve had the chance during the last few weeks as the quarter winds down to think about my own philosophy behind teaching. This stems out of both my work as a writing tutor in the College’s Writing Center and as a lab aide for Logo programming with the Designing Languages and Algebra to Algorithms programs this quarter.

I’ve always had a deep appreciation for teaching, which has deepened since I started working in tutoring positions, and deepened even more as a lab aide. As a lab aide, the strategies are basically exactly the same as they are when tutoring — lead the student to the answer for whatever question they’re asking. However, the process requires more breaks from that strategy: if a student doesn’t understand something, lab aides are expected to clue them in a bit with a nudge in the right direction, which usually means giving them some portion of the answer.

I’ve found that, as a lab aide, it’s very easy to understand what the lab is asking for, and it’s also easy to know the answer to the lab (so long as you’ve done the appropriate preparation beforehand), but it’s very hard to convey what the lab is about, much less convey the answers, to students. Thus, I’ve really been struggling this quarter with coming up with good ways to explain and relate concepts back to work that they’ve already done.

I found this especially true while in the lab last Thursday. The lab itself had to do with fractals — specifically, the Koch Snowflake (also known as the Koch Curve). The process of creating the fractal is very easy — using a standard triangle, “kink out” each side in order to create a level two Snowflake. Then, to create a level three Snowflake, use all the sides in a level two snowflake and “kink” those out. The Wikipedia entry has a graphic that shows the progression quite nicely. This is basically just the same idea applied over and over. It can be applied recursively (though that’s not really a great solution), but it’s actually better to implement it recursively for levels three and up. For levels two and one, it’s better to have a separate procedure to draw them, since the logic is so different.

Relatively straightforward, but very hard to explain when you’re not supposed to give students the answers.

While the strategies are really quite similar, the result is quite different — as a writing tutor, the final result of any session with me isn’t necessarily an answer, unless the student brings in a very specific question. Most often, in addition to an answer, students get an idea of what needs to be done next in order to allow their writing to grow. Not so as a lab aide — the process stops once the student gets the answer. They can certainly move on to other projects, and we, as aides, will help them find the answer for that project, but there is no sense of programming as a process. Which is ironic — programming is a process, but that process isn’t as obvious as it is in writing.

My philosophy as a tutor has always been that writing, as a process, needs to be nurtured and recognized. Academic writing may be perceived as boring, but it sets students up with an important life skill if taken advantage of properly: the art of written communication. My job as a writing tutor is to help inspire and install that art, and to help students realize that the process is ongoing. You can’t stop after a single draft (though there are exceptions to this); one has to keep going. With programming, the process very definitely stops — once the program’s written and it runs, at least in an academic environment, you’re done with it and probably won’t touch it again.

It’s true that that’s not true in the software world at large, but for the purposes of my lab aide work, it’s good enough.

I’m For Raising Local Gas Taxes

The Seattle Times reports today that Seattle-area Democrats are looking to raise area gas taxes by 15 cents over the next twelve years. This is a great idea, because not only does it fund repairs of two of the region’s major transportation arterials, but it also has an interesting possible side effect: as gas taxes go up, people will begin to look for cheaper alternatives.

In a word, hybrid cars.

But the problem is that the phase-in time is too slow. If we raise gas taxes that slowly, we run the risk of having funding cut off by people who don’t understand the reasoning behind the project now. In addition, it spurs complacency. The true problem in the world today is that people do not realize the true costs of the things we buy. In a consumerist society, we are not encouraged to understand real cost versus projected cost — projected cost being what we think the object is actually worth, versus the real cost of production and environmental impacts. This ties in closely to the debate over opening ANWR — opponents (like me) say that opening ANWR will damage a precious national wildlife refuge while only yeilding an oil supply equivalent to about three years. The proponents of such a plan argue that we don’t know what the yield will be because no oil exploration has been done. Both sides ignore some rather devastating cultural impact for local tribes who would be directly affected because their way of life keeps them in ANWR most days out of the year. The invasion of oil companies would be a drastic cultural impact for them and completely change their way of life.

Granted, this situation is nothing like ANWR, since there is little chance of this being construed as a bad proposal. It fixes transportation problems before they occur (sort of), rather than the DOT’s current pattern of “try to fix the problem that we should have designed for five years ago, only to attain five years later what we should have attained today”. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is already problematic, but it isn’t quite dead yet — everyone in the Seattle area knows it needs replacement. This gives us money to act on that.

Here’s hoping this doesn’t go to the myopic voters of Washington State.

Edit (1:19PM): In an odd coincidence, the Alaskan governor has written a position piece in the Seattle Times about ANWR drilling.

A Letter to the U.S. Supeme Court

To Justices Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsberg, and Breyer:

Regarding the case of Terri Schiavo: thank you. Thank you for not trying to set a national precedence on how to handle our own deaths. Thank you for not taking an already painful and complicated case and trying to render it within our limited understanding of what death means to others. Thank you for deciding that, in cases like these, you have no voice in whether people live or die. Most of all, thank you for realizing that the priorities of the nation are better assigned to other cases.

I am not trying to say that the Schiavo case is not important, or that those issues don’t touch the inner reaches of what it means to be human in a modern world. It is simply my personal belief that such issues are not the purview of the highest court in the nation. Your recognition of this fact upholds my faith in the national courts.

Thank you for your work.