Tag Archives: Society

The Vatican’s astronomer

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Quirks and Quarks is the CBC‘s weekly science and technology radio show. It is also available as a Podcast.

This past week’s episode contains an interview with the Vatican’s astronomer. He has a very interesting take on the intersection of science and religion. Definitely worth listening to.

Many people think that science and religion don’t mix. But Brother Guy Consolmagno couldn’t disagree more. He’s a Jesuit, and also an accomplished astronomer – in fact, he works for the Vatican Observatory. And for Brother Guy, science and religion aren’t in conflict in the least. He sees them as two compatible and complementary ways to seek the truth about the universe. This Easter weekend, Brother Guy tells us how he views the cosmos – both literally and spiritually.

Business as Morality

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Doc Searls: Business as Morality reprints an email written by Doc Searls discussing business morality. As with most of Doc’s writing it is worth reading. However, I would like to draw a little attention to one of the comments posted in response. It starts with the text “Wake the dragon”. This comment discusses the effects of the enormous cost reductions that the Internet has brought to content creation and distribution. The main idea is that the cost of content creation and distribution has been reduced to the point where content is being created without a profit motivation. This leads to a situation where for-profit companies must compete with entities who do not need to make money.

The main difference in the scenario above [media consolidation] and the current one that exist in the internet business sector is that the old scenario of market domination, and consolidation has been super imposed as a belief model in an space that it will not fit.

They [newspapers regarding on-line classified ads] also viewed the internet in an old world economic framework that postulates that business are only created and survive when revenue can be generated that makes the endeavor profitable.

Conservative party MPs not immune to lobbying

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The Conservative party of Canada has been making a big deal out of accountability during this election campaign. The following quote is from Harper Makes Commitment to Clean Up Government.

Stephen Harper said today his first piece of legislation as Prime Minister will be to introduce a new Federal Accountability Act designed to end the influence of big money in Ottawa and crack down on a lobbying culture that has thrived under Paul Martin.

To their credit, the Conservatives do outline some good ideas for dealing with this problem in the quoted article.

However, it would appear that at least one current Conservative MP is not a stranger to accepting money from lobby groups. From The Sad Reality of Copyright Policy in Canada:

In fact, notwithstanding the Conservatives’ claims of accountability, new research indicates that Oda is no stranger to funding support. According to her 2004 riding association data, she accepted thousands of dollars in contributions from the broadcast lobby. Corporate supporters included Alliance Atlantis, Astral Media, Canwest, and CHUM.

Lobbying Canadian MPs

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Like a lot of Canadians, I would like to believe that somehow our elected officials are immune to being overly influenced by special interest groups.

Unfortunately, I now know of one example where this is not the case. I find it incredibly hard to believe that Ms. Bulte thinks this is acceptable behavior.

An interesting comment on medical patents

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From The nose cells that may help the paralysed walk again found via Slashdot.

This is not the most popular way of attempting to heal spinal injuries. That would be to produce patented chemicals, which drug companies can make and sell. What we’re proposing could be carried out by any very modestly equipped hospital with neurosurgery. There are no patents. It makes it a very unpopular form of research.

We’re producing a procedure where the patient is their own cure. You can’t patent a patient’s own cells, thank God.

— Prof Geoffrey Raisman

Software analogy

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Inside Risks is the last page column in Communications of the ACM. The Inside Risks column in the September 2005 issue, written by Barbara Simons and Jim Horning, discusses how hard it is to get non-technical people to understand why writing bug-free, and more importantly secure software is so hard. The article offers a nice analogy with the following caveat, “Analogy is a poor tool for reasoning, but a good analogy can be very effective in developing intuition.”

One possibly useful analogy is the U.S. Tax Code. Americans have some sense of its complexity and of the large number of people employed in its interpretation. Tax loopholes are analogous to hidden malicious code or Trojan horses in software.

The tax code resembles software in other ways as well:

  • It is intended to be precise and to interface with messy realities of the real world.
  • It has been developed in multiple iterations, responding to changing circumstances and requirements.
  • The people who wrote the original version are no longer around.
  • No one understands it in its entirety.
  • It can be difficult to infer intent simply be reading a section.
  • There are people who actively seek to subvert it.

Of course, there are also major differences between the tax code and software. The tax code is relatively “small” – although it runs to several thousand printed pages, Windows XP has 40 million lines of source code.

The Collapse of Globalism

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A few days ago I finally finished reading The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul. Unfortunately, I only had time to read it at the rate of about a chapter a day so I didn’t give the book as thorough of a reading at it really deserves.

Despite the somewhat sensational title I found this book to be much more balanced than I thought it would be. At several points Saul explains some of the good that has come with globalization but make no mistake, this book is about what has went wrong.

Saul believes that the ideas which drive globalism are based more on ideology than fact. This book does great service to society by tearing apart a simple ideology that will supposedly solve all of the world’s problems. Saul does not argue that all aspects of globalism are bad. He simply argues that one economic model cannot work in all situations. Pretty common sense when you think about it.

Here are couple of links to reviews of this book that are much better than mine.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/08/04.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_1,00.html