Here’s an Idea: New Water Taxi Service

As Washington State Ferries prepares to sell two passenger-only ferries so that they can focus on their main vehicle ferry fleet (New York Times, Seattle Times), why don’t we consider a new foot ferry program between the University of Washington and Kirkland, allowing foot travel across northern Lake Washington? We’ll be faced with traffic delays and issues as the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (otherwise known as the 520 Floating Bridge) is replaced in a few years. The idea has been suggested before by King County councilman Dow Constantine, and a similar program exists in the Elliott Bay Water Taxi program offered by King County Metro. It would definitely make it easier for people to get across the lake, considering that transit options into places like Kirkland and Bellevue from the University are decidedly lacking.

Other good reasons for this:

  • We don’t have to remove boats from the region that are already here.
  • The program would encourage people to leave their cars at home if the route were designed in a sensible manner with good connections to Metro, Sound Transit, or Community Transit on either end of the taxi route.
  • The program would be a great link-in to the already proposed and hopefully soon-to-be-implemented Sound Transit light-rail link to the UW.

Some challenges exist, of course:

  • Who owns/runs the boats? The University of Washington? King County Metro? A private operation?
  • How do we encourage ridership?
  • Can this be a year-long program? Currently, the Elliott Bay Water Taxi shuts down for the winter.

Update (11:50PM): here is the link I was originally searching for from Dow Constantine’s research into the subject back in 2005.

Flickr Update

All my photos are now here, with a slideshow here.  There’s lots of new ones too for people who keep asking when they’ll ever see the photos I’ve taken (*cough*Dad*cough*).  Alas, these aren’t ordered chronologically, so stuff that happened back in 2004 is sometimes placed after stuff in 2006.  The photostream seems to go off of posting date, which doesn’t necessarily match the reality of when the photo was taken (and Flickr is too smart – I can’t date uploads as having happened before today, since I only just signed up).

If someone’s reading this that knows how to change the photostream settings to pay attention to image date rather than upload date, that’d be nice.  I doubt it’s possible based on the FAQs, though.

There are, in particular, more photos from my 2006 road trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

Research Conversation: Personal Information for A World As We Want It to Be

William Jones, one of the professors at the iSchool, gave a really interesting talk about the idea of personal information management and how to improve our ability to find the information we need. Jones is one of the lead researchers for the Keeping Found Things Found project, which is a project that I’ve had some interest in since I discovered it through my research on the iSchool itself.

Some notes from the presentation:

  • Why do we have folders?
    • From the audience: to organize data.
      • Why do we organize data?
        • To find/locate information.
    • As a quick reference into the materials we need.
    • As content metadata
  • Search on our own machines gives us the ability to get stuff the same way as on the Web, so why would there be resistance to this?
  • Audience member observation: There’s a difference between finding things and finding new stuff
  • Folders are a part of our interaction with data
  • Why do people use folders in so many diverse ways?
  • The Web is becoming an extension of ourselves (and of our personal information)
  • Capturing information is now very easy
  • Storage is now very cheap
  • Search makes retrieval of information easy (if it is properly indexes and if there’s some form of version control – search does no good if we’re looking for old versions of things we already have)
  • Information fragmentation – the idea that our information is now incredibly spread out – is a more recent problem than that of information overload, which has existed, one could argue, for centuries
  • Keeping Found Things Found project did three major studies:
    • How people keep information
    • How people re-locate information they have
    • How people organize their information
  • There is a lot of diversity in the way that people organize their information – why is this?
  • An audience member gave an example of using e-mail instead of favorites or bookmarks to manage their web site. When asked why, they explained that they didn’t want their favorites list to get too long or unmanageable.
  • What about the recall of information? KFTF participants were given a list of information they had accessed 3+ months ago and asked to relocate it quickly using whatever method they wanted. They were only given five minutes for the task. After that five minutes, it was found that there was a 95% successs rate in finding that information based on a list of particular conditions (what those conditions were wasn’t discussed in the talk). However, there were some issues with people trying to remember where that information was stored. It was also noted that “Do nothing” methods – where people had made no prior note as to where the information was located (methods like Google searching) won out over bookmarks and most other methods of information search and retrieval.
  • Fourteen participants were asked to give a tour of their folder/information organization on their computers. For every single participant, there was something where they said “this shouldn’t be here”, and a small number even had to stop the demonstration to move the information to the correct location.
  • An idea Jones suggested was that old information should slowly fade from view – it doesn’t get deleted, it just isn’t visible.
  • It’s easier to pay the small cost of not being able to find things immediately than to pay the larger cost of having to reorganize or clean out our information resources.
  • An audience member noted that economics can play a big role in how information is organized, especially in a work environment – if we get paid to do things quickly, our information organizational structure better make things easy to find!

Updated: Potential Winter Quarter Electives

Updated potential electives list (Update – 11/12 3:35PM – The list below is now ranked):

  1. PB AF 594, Economic Approaches to Environmental Management, (3 credits, description)
  2. INFO 498, Special Topics in Informatics: Programming Semantic Structures (1-5 credits, description)
  3. IMT 586, Information Dynamics I (4 credits)

    This is after reading the description sent to the iMSIM mailing list by Mike Crandall on the 9th of this month:

    “Have you ever wondered …

    • what causes some ideas, products, and companies to become fads that peak and die, while others have staying power?
    • why there are business cycles?
    • what causes some diseases to become epidemics and others to subside with little effect?
    • why real change often takes so long?
    • the role information plays in the answer to each of these questions?

    Would you like to learn how to answer these and other such questions yourself?

    Sign up for IMT 586, Information Dynamics I, in the Winter Quarter.”

  4. LIS 559, Special Topics in the Social Context of Information (1-4 credits, description)
  5. IMT 546, Data Communications and Networking (4 credits, description provided by instructor)
    Update (11/12 3:30PM): The professor for the course indicates that this is likely going to be review material, so it’s been removed from this list and the schedule below.

Updated visual schedule (Excel is good for this stuff):

Potential Winter schedule as of 11/12

Update (11/12 12:30AM): I have e-mail messages out to the Evans School regarding PB AF 594 and an e-mail out to the instructor for IMT 546 to figure out whether these courses should stay on my list or not. For PB AF 594, this depends entirely on which registration period I have to wait for to register. For IMT 546, it depends on whether the course covers topics I already know a lot about, which isn’t clear from the provided description.

Why I Voted No on Proposition 1

November 6th marked election day in Washington State.  One of the biggest items on the ballot was Proposition 1: REGIONAL ROADS AND TRANSIT SYSTEM, which was soundly defeated in the polls with 55.47% voting no.  This was the largest transportation bill ever proposed to King County voters and those within the districts affected by the proposed changes.

Looking at the list of proposed improvements, a good chunk of them are necessary improvements to the existing transportation infrastructure in King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties.  So why vote it down?

  1. The measure was, quite simply, too big, and this is the fault of the state.  Voters had no ability to vote yes on individual portions of the proposal and had to either accept or reject the entire package.  This is explained in the King County Voters Pamphlet, which exposes the text of the measure itself.  That text includes the following statement:”WHEREAS, in 2007, the State Legislature, enacted Substitute House Bill 1396, which requires Sound Transit and RTID to submit their proposed transportation plans in a single ballot question in order to provide voters with an easier and more efficient method of expressing their will, and which included findings that transportation improvements proposed by Sound Transit and RTID form integral parts of, and are naturally and necessarily related to, a single regional transportation system . . .”

    The state legislature effectively doomed the measure by requiring this.

  2. We don’t need to keep throwing money at fixing and expanding an infrastructure that is in bad need of rethinking.  It is not sustainable to add yet more capacity to the system, which will not encourage the use of alternatives like light rail, bus lines, bikes, and carpooling.  Increasing population density and making the existing city cores more walkable and livable in general will help create an environment where we don’t need to drive as much (if at all).  The goal here should not be continuation of the status quo; it should be a complete reversal and rethinking of it.
  3. We need to start thinking about how to best preserve the spaces we have, which is not assisted by further sprawl and massive projects to revamp infrastructure.  The Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle is a perfect example.  This is a major highway into and out of Seattle, granted, but there are other ways to direct traffic through the city.  When the bus tunnel closed for maintenance several years ago, everybody assumed that it was the end of the world and traffic would grind to a halt.  This never materialized.  We adjusted.  We would adjust to not having access to the Viaduct and being rewarded with a more welcoming waterfront.

I push for the idea of sustainability because I recognize my impact on the world.  I recognize the need to maintain the infrastructure that exists already, but I do not recognize the need to expand upon it unless such expansions support new transportation options rather than simply inviting more cars to join our already-clogged highway system.  I recognize the need for transit, but I also recognize that the more single-occupancy cars we add to our roads, the faster the infrastructure deteriorates and the sooner we need solutions that make sense.  That solution is not a gigantic package where voters have no choice in what they can and cannot accept.  We need a la carte voting on these measures so that voters can properly speak their minds.  If this ever happens, I will support mass transit in favor of less sustainable transportation expansions.

Concurrent Masters Degrees

I attended an information session this afternoon about the informal concurrent MLIS/MPA degree partnership with the Evans School – many thanks to former coworker-turned-MLIS/MPA-candidate Bo Kinney for running into me on the way out of class.  As it turns out, this is actually the result of this graduate school policy, which establishes that any student can do a concurrent masters informally by applying for admissions to both of the programs they want a degree from:

Informal Concurrent Degree Programs
Students in these programs pursue two degrees from different departments simultaneously.  These programs have not been approved as formal concurrent programs, but students complete the same requirements as in the formal concurrent programs.

To earn two master’s degrees, a student must complete the equivalent of two Graduate School degree requirements of 36 credits each for a minimum of 72 credits. If one or both of the participating programs require more than the minimum of 36 credits, those additional credits may be “shared”, and applied to both degrees. However, the total number of credits completed must total at least 72 and both programs must approve the credits counted toward both degrees.  Up to 12 credits earned toward a Ph.D. degree may be counted toward a Master’s degree in another program with the approval of both degree offering units.

It is the responsibility of the student to submit a written list of courses which apply toward each respective degree at the time he or she files an application for the Master’s degree or schedules the general examination. This list must be approved by both programs.

The Information School and the Evans School has several students (in the MLIS program) doing this joint degree work, and apparently it has been done by MSIM students in the past as well.  Since this isn’t a formal concurrency degree, there’s a lot of flexibility in the arrangement.

As noted in a previous post, I actually already am considering taking courses in the Evans School curriculum series.  I’m actually starting to think about this idea, since it also means that I could potentially get two Masters degrees in three years.  If I were to do it, surprisingly, the Evans School might be a good option, particularly because of their environmental policy and natural resources management policy gateway, which is one of the primary focuses of Evans School researchers.  Other options would include Computer Science and Engineering and Technical Communication.  Interestingly enough, the Law School has an Environmental Law concentration track (Dad, Don – what was that I said about NEVER taking law and the familial limit for lawyers being reached….?).

I would have to formally apply for admissions to the second program, and would start the concurrent degree next year (2008-2009) if I were to decide to pursue it.  That means, though, that I’d have to apply by January or February.  That also means application fees, essays, and recommendations (ugh), though I sort of doubt that I’d have to retake the GRE.  Further communication with program advisers would be necessary to figure out what would be needed for application materials.

I’m considering this, since it makes really good economic sense – three years of debt versus four if I were to return for another Masters degree.  Alas, the other Masters degree that was originally very interesting to me – the MBA in Sustainable Business from Bainbridge Graduate Institute – doesn’t count under this program, since they’re two distinct institutions.  And I’d have to be insane to do three Masters programs.  Hell, I’m almost insane for thinking about doing two…

Introverts

This sounds a lot like me (not shockingly – I have a Meyers-Briggs type of ISTJ, and, in fact, scored 0 in the “E” (extravert) category last time I took that particular test).