For the care of my readers, who despite the absence of blogposts in the last half decade have loyally continued to subscribe here, please note that this blog is mostly dead.
But, as a wise man once noted, mostly dead is a little bit alive.
In the event that Twitter joins MySpace, Tumblr, LiveJournal and all the others in Social Media Valhalla, I'll likely be here. I can also be found on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and (for the knowing) Reddit.
Note: This week’s post will probably be a little briefer than normal because Life is happening to me. (Everything’s fine, just busy.)
Vaccines
This article reports that Canada has authorized using Novavax as a booster dose. From a practical standpoint, I think what that means is that the pharmacist doesn’t need to give you a speech about how you’re doing this “off-label” and are you suuuure you want a Novavax booster?
This Moderna press release says that their BA.5 bivalent vaccine gave 5 times higher antibody levels against BA.4/5 than the Moderna Classic monovalent gave. That’s solid. It’s not fantastic — the scientists look for a 10x improvement — but it’s quite good.
Pfizer announced that it’s starting Phase 1 trials of a new COVID-19 vax, one that has proteins from the spike and non-spike parts of the virus, including parts which don’t mutate as fast. The hope is that it will give broader, more durable immunity.
One side effect of using more proteins is that it might make it impossible to tell if someone’s had a COVID-19 infection. If it gives broader and more durable coverage, that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.
This paper from Canada says that you are almost three times as likely to get myocarditis or pericarditis from a Moderna vax than from a Pfizer vax. The risk goes slightly over 3x for men over 40 (who have a lower absolute risk than younger men). (Note: you are much MUCH more likely to get myocarditis or pericarditis from a COVID-19 infection than from the vaccination.)
This preprint from Pfizer showed that the bivalent BA.4/5 elicited many more antibodies against new variants than Pfizer Classic monovalent after three doses of Pfizer Classic in people over 55:
Variant
GMFR from Classic
GMFR from bivalent
GMFR from Classic for uninfected
GMFR from bivalent for uninfected
Classic (WA1-2020)
3.0
5.8
4.4
9.9
BA.4/5
2.9
13.0
3.0
26.4
BA.4.6
2.3
11.1
2.5
22.2
BA.2.75.2
2.1
6.7
2.0
8.4
BQ.1.1
1.8
8.7
1.5
12.6
XBB.1
1.5
4.8
1.3
4.7
GMFR = geometric mean neutralizing titer fold rise
Mitigation Measures
This paper from Germany found that instituting a night curfew (on top of other mitigation measures) didn’t do squat for the COVID-19 infection rate.
Long COVID
This paper from Spain says that 59.7% of hospitalized patients and 67.5% non-hospitalized patients had at least one Long COVID symptom after two years. HOWEVER, this study was done with a phone survey and does not have a control arm. I can imagine that they asked, “do you have days where you feel tired?”, and c’mon, everybody has days when they feel tired.
More interesting to me were some specific, unusual symptoms:
21% of non-hospitalized patients lost their smell early in their recovery, while only 10% of hospitalized patients did;
20% of hospitalized patients had some memory loss, while 15.9% of non-hospitalized patients did.
Co-morbidities correlated with shortness of breath and fatigue.
Pathology
This paper from the UK pulled two matched cohorts of patients: one cohort had had influenza infections and one had had COVID-19 infections. They found that the people who had had COVID-19 infections were 87% more likely to develop epilepsy.
Treatments
This preprint from the USA found that 14.2% of people who got Paxlovid and 9.3% of people who did not (a difference of ~5%) tested positive for COVID-19 afterwards (“rebound”). 18.9% of people who got Paxlovid has symptom rebound, compared to 7.0% in the control group (a difference of ~12%). So yes, Paxlovid rebound happens, but it’s not nearly the majority of cases. (It is absolutely not a valid reason to not take Paxlovid.)
Transmission
I had seen papers before which said that air humidity matters for COVID-19: too dry or too wet is bad. This paper from the USA looked specifically at indoor air humidity, and found the same thing: you want a Goldilocks humidity of between 40 and 60%.
This article says that there are 31 different animal species which have been observed to catch SARS-COV-2 including mink, deer, dogs, cats, ferrets, lots of large felines, cows, fox, otters, hyenas, hippos, manatees, hamsters, beavers, anteaters, coati, binturongs, marmosets, various primates, and — my favourite — the large hairy armadillo.
Recommended Reading
This article looks at how the pandemic changed lawyers’ lives.
There was a press briefing. I didn’t watch it; I was busy and kind of depressed about the pandemic. (I am well within my mental health limits, but it is hard to be so close to the train wreck that is the global COVID-19 response.) This thread gives a summary of the press briefing.
Statistics
Reminder that these statistics are wildly inaccurate. First, the province case counts do not include reinfections for some bizarre reason. Second, the case counts are wildly undercounted: two different studies estimated the undercount as being ~90x. Third, hospitalizations are only counted if the person tested positive on a PCR test; rapid tests don’t count. Fourth, hospitalizations don’t count if they were discharged on the same day.
As of today, the BC CDC weekly report said that in the week ending on 12 Nov there were: +487 confirmed cases, +144 hospital admissions, +33 ICU admissions, +30 all-cause deaths.
As of today, the weekly report said that the previous week (data through 5 Nov) there were: +407 confirmed cases, +159 hospital admissions, +26 ICU admissions, +40 all-cause deaths.
Last week, the BC CDC weekly report said that in the week ending on 5 Nov there were: +407 confirmed cases, +124 hospital admissions, +24 ICU admissions, +20 all-cause deaths.
Last week, the weekly report said that the previous week (data through 29 October) there were: +486 confirmed cases, +149 hospital admissions, +33 ICU admissions, +28 all-cause deaths.
The BC CDC dashboard says that there are 328 in hospital / 26 in ICU as of 17 November 2022.
Vorgestern hatte ich einen überraschenden Anruf von Gernot, den ich seit etwa 30 Jahren kenne. Neue Handy-Nummer, beinahe wäre ich nicht drangegangen. Gernot wollte mich einladen, weil sein geplanter Gast für ein neues Format abgesprungen war. Das sollte die erst dritte Sendung einer hoffentlich langen Reihe werden und die beiden Moderatoren müssen sich erst noch eingrooven. Ihr werdet merken, dass Harry kaum zu Wort kommt, was sicher auch an mir liegt. Ich habe kein Lampenfieber, auch “live on air” nicht.
Kleiner Fauxpas: Wir haben keinen Soundcheck gemacht und deshalb ist der Ton von meiner Seite zu hallig. Ich hätte mein Shure Mikro nehmen und näher rangehen müssen. Wenn man sich erst mal an den Sound gewöhnt hat, geht es aber.
Gernot hat eine Live-Übertragung bei Youtube gemacht, die nur 220 Leute gesehen haben und jetzt einen Studio Edit veröffentlicht, bei dem Anfang und Ende weggeschnitten sind. Viel Spaß!
The following video guide shows you how to install Mastodon on a Reclaim Cloud virtual private server (VPS). This guide assumes you have your VPS spun up in Reclaim Cloud, a domain for your server chosen, a transactional email account setup with Mailgun, as well as cloud storage using Amazon S3. If none of this is true (or makes no sense), I recommend starting with the “Preparing to Install Mastodon on Reclaim Cloud” guide.
Heads up: As you get to the final minute of the tutorial you need to uncomment two additional lines in the nginx default file, be sure to see notes below
The above video takes you through installing Mastodon from source on a Debian 11.5 VPS, which is well-documented in their own guides. I recommend using that guide as you follow along with the video. That said, there are several moments wherein you will need to deviate from that guide to get Mastodon v4.0.2 running in Reclaim Cloud. Those divergences from their guide will be documented below with time stamps and a brief description:
7:45-8:30 Don’t install Ruby 3.0.3, rather install Ruby 3.0.4. So, replace the commands they suggest with the following two commands: RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-jemalloc rbenv install 3.0.4 rbenv global 3.0.4 8:55-9:30 Run the following two commands to start postgreSQL and Redis: systemctl start postgresql systemctl start redis 14:25-21:00 This is the six minutes of the video when I run through the interactive installer to input environment variables, including domain name, AWS’s S3 settings, Mailgun settings, and more. It might be useful to reference this.
23:00-26:40 Editing /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon file to update domain from example.com to your domain, in my example ds106.social. There will be four instances you need to replace. After that, which is documented, you need to copy lines 26 and 27 and paste them below, and then comment out the original lines 26 and 27. or the new lines you copied in, you want to edit them to look like the following:
listen 443; listen [::]:443;
After you have saved this file, you can go back and delete the default file at /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and rename the mastodon file we just edited to default. Finally, you will need to edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf at line 60 and change it from:
include /etc/nginx/sites-available/*
to include /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
After that, save the file and run the fulling command to restart nginx:
systemctl start nginx
26:50-27:50 Turn off the firewall for the Reclaim Cloud VPS temporarily and add inbound ports 80 and 443. Be sure to turn the firewall back on after running the cerbot commands to get an SSL certificate.
29:00-30:00 Uncomment the two listen 443 lines we commented out earlier at 26 and 27 (they will now be at lines 32 and 33) and remove the lines we added that were directly beneath them, namely
listen 443; listen [::]:443;
After that you want to comment out the entire listen block from lines 16-29, the block should look like this:
# listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
# listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
# ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/social.ds106.us/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
# ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/social.ds106.us/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
# include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
# ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
#}
Finally, there are two final lines you need to uncomment, lines 43 and 44. I am now realizing I fail to mention these in the video, but I will rectify that now:
After you make these changes to /etc/nginx/sites-available/default save the file and restart nginx:
systemctl restart nginx
At this point I recommend turning the firewall in the Reclaim Cloud VPS back on, and going to your domain and hopefully revel in Mastodon loading. If that is not the case, no worries, mate, just let me know the issues you run into in the comments below and I’ll try and help.
I added a new feature to Datasette Lite: you can now pass it the URL to a JSON file (hosted on a CORS-compatible hosting provider such as GitHub or GitHub Gists) and it will load that file into a database table for you. It expects an array of objects, but if your file has an object as the root it will search through it looking for the first key that is an array of objects and load those instead.
Today's Mastodon/Twitter update. The site fediverse.space came out a couple days ago with a nice interactive visualization of the network of Mastodon instances. In this post Miguel Guhlin points to a Mapstodon, from comeetie ("at the link, comeetie also shares the notebook behind the app if you are interested in the code"). In other Mastodon news, here's a toot bookmarklet you can use while browsing; also, your 'Twitter go bag' to make your escape; also, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," goes the saying, and as Michael Veale says, "right now, it feels like we're waiting to find out our product status." Though that said, "Even if you're paying for the product, you're the product," Cory Doctorow wrote on discovering Apple privacy violations. Meanwhile, Dave Truss reflects on fifteen years of Twitter. Finally, after a week on Mastodon Zoe Williams asks, "Could this be Twitter without the toxic slurry?"
Archaeoacoustics is the study of what ancient places sounded like. For example: the colosseum in Rome when full and thriving. The archaeology of sound.
For instance, the Mayan pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza: the pyramid’s stairs give a curious “chirp” echo in respond to a hand clap.
After studying the staircases and analyzing his recordings and sonograms of the echoes, Lubman came back convinced that this was no architectural freak. In his paper, Lubman argued that the design of the staircases was deliberate and that the echo is an ancient recording, coded in stone, of the call of the Maya’s sacred bird, the quetzal.
Cave paintings in northern Finland: "the researchers concluded that the cliffs with rock paintings are efficient sound reflectors (Rainio et al., 2018). The sound appears to emanate directly from the painted figures."
That example from this wonderful paper introducing the new discipline of experimental psychoarchaeoacoustics:"our focus will be on what led people to paint or engrave rock art at sonorous sites in the distant past. We wish to inquire into perception and emotion in the past related to sound."
(Musical instruments made of rock are called lithophones.)
LENGTHY ASIDE:
Could ancient sound be frozen unintentionally?
In February 1969, in a humour column in New Scientist:
[A] trowel, like any flat plate, must vibrate in response to sound: thus, drawn over the wet surface by the singing plasterer, it must emboss a gramophone-type recording of his song in the plaster. Once the surface is dry, it may be played back.
And in August 1969, in Proceedings of the IEEE, a letter titled "Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity" which is completely straight-faced:
With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified. …
This is to record the finding of a spoken word in an oil portrait. The word was “blue” and was located in a blue paint stroke-as if the artist was talking to himself or to the subject.
Bizarrely the author of the letter claims to have written their letter in January 1969, before the Daedelus column, and had it rejected.
SCIENTIST JAPES.
There are two good write-ups of this unlikely-but-fun-to-imagine discovery:
Language Log: A Phonographic Phony (2006) - which traces the origin of the "paleoacoustic" idea back to 1955 and an episode of Science Fiction Theatre
Tenser, said the Tensor: Pottery Recordings (2006) - which reproduces the whole letter from Proceedings and lists a few sci-fi stories where the same idea appears.
RELATED:
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.
(You need a camera that can record 2,000–6,000 frames per second. A phone does 60 fps.)
Labs that investigate archaeocoustics have to do so with simulation, using room acoustics software and VR. Here’s a write-up by room acoustics software provider Odeon, including a simulated auralisation of Hagia Sophia.
There are also labs that investigate psychoacoustics experimentally. immpaLAB: Immersive PsychoAcoustic Laboratory creates sound environments and collects responses… "examples of affective labels used in these scales are ‘tension’, ‘power’, ‘transcendence’, ‘joy’."
I feel like I’d like to have these brought together: given a location that no longer exists, a cave or a stone circle or an amphitheatre, how would it make you feel? And reversing it: given a desired psychological profile, what’s the architecture of the space I should be in?
You can close your eyes and click or hum and tell if you’re in a tiny or vast space.
So: can you have computational synthetic acoustics?
Like, could I wear headphones and have the acoustic space of the Colosseum or Hagia Sophia or Abbey Road wrapped around my music? Could I buy awe as an in-app purchase? How about a realtime psychoacoustic graphic equaliser with passthrough, mutating the everyday sound of the street such that I’m microdosing cathedrals?
I mentioned recently (here) that I have this livestream of a waterhole in the Namibian desert(YouTube) open in the background a whole bunch at the moment. The why is the sound (I have it on now). You can hear the desert wind, the birds chattering and the antelope chuntering to one-another; the sky changes over the day, the animals come and go. It’s calming. I can focus. Why have music? Well I have music too. Why not more of this?
My dream would be to inhabit this aural environment as I go about my day, ambiently, not immersive exactly but everywhere, a layer of dreaming overlaying the reality of my home – upstairs the forest, in my office the desert. In the middle of the night if I tiptoe all the way downstairs I step in the dark onto the savannah and bathe in the nocturnal infrasonic hum of giraffe calling across the open plain.
Hey happy Friday y’all. I don’t say that enough. I hope you’re in a good place. Look after yourself.
A story about two hands doing work to support digital transformation in government
Pain is weakness leaving the body — A quote often attributed to United States Marine Corps
I want to tell you a short story. it’s a story about my hands.
Sometime in mid 2017, I woke up one morning with pain at the base of my middle finger on my left hand. For a while I attributed this pain to exercise or just general overuse. After a while I developed what’s called “trigger finger,” and the pain started to spread to other parts of my hands.
Not wanting to admit that I was getting older, I tried to reason why this might be happening to me. For many years I was a competitive gymnast and I regularly abused my hands. For a good portion of my younger life my hands were covered in thick calluses from wrists to fingertips. Finger jams and sprains were a common occurrence, and sometimes after practices my hands would hurt so badly I would plunge them into an ice bucket to reduce the pain and swelling.
Certainly the athletic endeavors of my youth had contributed to my condition, right? After talking with several of my former teammates, I found that none of them was experiencing the same symptoms as I was. And I gradually came to realize that the root cause of my problem was sitting right in front of me — my keyboard.
I’ve always been a hard typer and I’ve not always used proper form. After many years of undisciplined typing, I found myself in a place where every time I typed it hurt. After living with this pain for a while, I decided to get some help and change my habits.
Notes actually do mean something. They have power. I think of notes as being expensive. You don’t just throw them around. — The Edge, Guitarist for the band U2 (emphasis added)
I think about this quote a lot. and I have come to appreciate how it applies to typing. Keystrokes are expensive, but you don’t pay the bill right away — the cost accrues over many years. And eventually the bill comes due.
Mine certainly has.
As civic technologists our hands are one of our most important tools, outranked in importance only by our brains and our hearts. But working in technology can create some unhealthy incentives. People become obsessive, almost religious, about the tools that they use. Giving up a cherished tool or adopting a new approach is often hard because the tools we use can get tangled up in our identity. (Am I really a developer if I’m not using vim? )
In addition, some of us may have turned down more lucrative opportunities in the private sector to work in government. We may view our time in government as sort of a sacrifice that we are happy to make to serve the public. With this mindset, it can be easy to rationalize other kinds of sacrifice. I mean, what’s a little joint pain if it will serve the greater good?
But the truth is that there is no nobility in pain, no heroic essence that we can distill from experiencing it. It’s just pain, and it hurts. The best thing we can do to do our jobs well and to serve the public is to take good care of ourselves. Digital transformation is the kind of work that can take many years. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Here are some things that I have tried to do to change my bad habits, and reduce my hand pain. Hopefully, some of this will help others that are experiencing similar problems.
Talk to your doctor. Your doctor can share with you options for pain management and other interventions that can reduce your hand pain. I’ve received Cortisone shots in several fingers and it can really help.
Use proper typing form and an ergonomic keyboard. I recently switched to the Kinesis Freestyle2 Adjustable Split Keyboard, and have committed myself to returning to proper typing form.
Take time to loosen your hands, wrist, and forearm muscles at regular intervals during the day. I have a reminder set for every hour or two throughout the day to remind me to stand up, stretch, and loosen my hands. It’s a good habit to get into.
Make use of assistive technologies if you can to cut down on keystrokes. There are also lots of plugins and add-ons to your favorite IDE that can reduce the amount of keystrokes you need to write code.
Consider changes to your diet that may help as well. Over the past couple of years I’ve totally overhauled my diet, reducing my sugar intake and increasing consumption of other anti-inflammatory foods. Regular exercise to strengthen your arms and hands is good also.
If you have other tips, tricks, or suggestions please feel free to add a comment on this post.
Making change is never easy but if we’re going to do our jobs the best we can it’s important that we take care of ourselves for the long haul.
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The open data movement had started a few years prior, and quickly caught the imagination of civic groups and technologists interested in helping make government work better. These groups wrote data scrapers, held hackathons, partnered with other civic groups, and lobbied elected officials to make the goal of publishing valuable data in easy to use formats official government policy.
A wave of new local government executive orders and the adoption of resolutions followed, culminating in the enactment of an Executive Order by the Obama Administration the turned publishing open data into the default for the federal government. This Executive Order took open data mainstream, and now it’s more likely than not that a city (or county, or state) has an open data program, policy, or platform.
At the time that open data was still catching on in the late aughts and early teens, I remember the feeling I had of being swept up in the growing movement. I advocated for it with what felt like a religious intensity. It became the focus of my professional life — regardless of what job I was in at the time, open data ended up being all I wanted to talk about.
I was a true believer. And I still am, to some degree.
So it’s interesting now to watch another wave of enthusiasm start to sweep city governments and catch the attention of innovators. Like the open data movement before it, this new wave seems to be starting with local governments. Unlike the open data movement, this one seems to be driven not by civic groups and people outside government, but by elected officials themselves.
People that advocate for the use of blockchain technologies or cryptocurrencies in government tend to sound evangelical about it. They are true believers. I can relate to that.
But this new enthusiasm for blockchain in government is misplaced. It is a poor foundation for public policy and government operations.
Recently, the City of Philadelphia became the latest local government to jump on the blockchain bandwagon, joining several other cities in offering a new city-branded cryptocurrency.
The logic of this decision seems to be that it offers a way for people in or from Philadelphia to mine the new city-branded coins, with 30% of the value generated being dedicated to the city coffers. It has the additional theoretical benefit of signaling to crypto and blockchain entrepreneurs that Philadelphia is a “friendly” environment for their business concerns — whatever that means.
A new revenue source to fund city initiatives, and a fresh coat of polish for local business development efforts. What’s not to like?
It turns out, a lot actually.
Full disclaimer — I’m not an expert in cryptocurrency, but you don’t have to take my word that there are serious problems with the idea of a city-branded cryptocurrency. I can say that as an approach to municipal finance, it probably leaves an awful lot to be desired. (I can’t imagine a program like this coming up in any serious way in discussions between — for example — city officials and any one of the bond rating agencies that weigh in on municipal debt issuance. The city would likely get laughed out of the room.)
City-branded coins are likely just a gimmick. An empty gesture meant to (hopefully) convey some level of technology relevance to the business community, and enable elected officials to pay lip service to “exporting the tax burden.”
Pure nonsense.
But the adoption of a city-branded cryptocurrency in Philadelphia specifically raises several serious problems that are worth considering when we talk about these kinds of programs.
First, the appeal of a city-branded cryptocurrency isn’t just that it can generate money for the city. It’s also that you — yes, you! — could get rich. Investors aren’t wild about crypto because of its stable, predictable, longterm returns. The idea that people can mine their own money and get rich quick has enormous resonance. The volatility of crypto is part of the appeal.
But in a city like Philadelphia that continues to struggle with poverty, and has the highest poverty rate of big cities in the U.S., this is an especially troubling position for a city government to take. You could argue that city-branded cryptocurrency is the moral equivalent to state-sanctioned lotteries, which run ads pushing another way to get rich quick. But this isn’t Harrisburg sanctioning a program which disproportionately falls on lower-income citizens, this is the city doing it to it’s own people.
If mining city-branded coins is indeed a good investment, that has benefits for both currency miners and the city, it’s likely that 1/4 of Philadelphia residents wouldn’t be able to participate in the program. The city has suggested that funds generated by the program could be used to help close the technology equity gap:
…Kenney’s office said Philadelphia is “enthusiastic about the potential of donations from a CityCoins program to target pressing problems in the city,” including funding for digital-equity initiatives, rental assistance and arts programs.
This statement helps to highlight another connection to state-run lotteries — a promise of earmarked funding to muster political support and blunt criticism. The promise of targeting lottery proceeds for education is a tried and true way of insulating such programs from critics who contend that they aggravate problems with compulsive gambling and overwhelming fall on the backs of low-income citizens. But the track record of earmarking funds from morally questionable government programs to those that are politically safe or popular is far from clear.
It’s hard not to interpret such statements as taking a page out of the state-run lottery playbook. They seem like a transparent attempt to burnish the appeal of such programs by connecting them to those that have less controversy and wider appeal.
Ten years ago, I became one of the first municipal chief data officers in the country. But that appointment, and my time spent in that position, are less important to my way of thinking about using blockchain or cryptocurrency in government than what came before and after. I have spent almost my entire adult life studying about and working in government. For the last two decades I’ve focused specifically on using technology to improve the way government operates.
I want to believe in the power of new technology to change government in radical ways. I really do. I’ve proven myself an enthusiastic disciple of this faith. I’ve kneeled at the altar before.
But with blockchain and cryptocurrency, there is simply nothing there that can help government do the jobs it needs to, in the ways it needs to.
Our best course of action when dealing with proposals for municipal cryptocurrencies is to heed the warnings of false prophets, and get on with the business of making government work better for the people who need it most.
Two things happened at the same time this week that made me think about how inefficient, opaque processes can introduce opportunities for certain individuals to receive beneficial treatment.
First, my wife and I had to take one of our children for a PCR test. The process of getting the results of this test were… frustrating. An unspecific claim of a “computer glitch” slowed the delivery of the outcome of the test, and resulted in lots of frustrated calls to the lab. Second, I noticed a recent article from the local newspaper about the salary of the president of the very hospital where we took our child for her test. Turns out, this person is among the highest paid state employees in New York State.
The proximity of these two things in my brain got me wondering — what would happen if his child needed a PCR test. What are the chances the result would be delayed by a “computer glitch” at the hospital’s lab? Probably pretty slim I reckoned.
Now — I don’t know this person, or even if they have kids. I’m just wondering aloud. Not at all an uncommon thing for a frustrated parent with surplus time to do. But it does make me think about how complex, opaque, or expensive (in time or money) government processes might introduce opportunities for certain people to receive special treatment. People with access, relationships, or resources.
Some notoriously burdensome government processes have their own cottage industry of “expeditors” that have developed around them, as anyone that has had to file a building permit in some parts of the country can tell you. I mean, it’s not like this issue hasn’t cropped up in the past with relation to COVID testing or anything.
But it’s valuable to consider the relationship between the complexity of a government process and the potential for corruption (which I’ll use as shorthand for people with resources getting unfairly beneficial treatment). The more burdensome, lengthy, or expensive a government process is, the more opportunities there are for powerful individuals to use their influence to obtain more favorable treatment. Complexity is the fertile ground in which the seeds of corruption can find purchase.
If we make these processes less burdensome, quicker, and cheaper, we insulate them from corruption. You can’t game the system if there is no relative benefit of doing so.
There’s a ton of good information on administrative burdens and the benefits of reducing them, and now I’m curious if there is anything in the public administration research or literature about the direct relationship between the efficiency of a process and the potential for corruption.
That’s research for another day.
Still, even the anecdotal relationship between efforts to reduce the burden of government processes and the potential to reduce corruption are exciting. As someone who works to make government operate more transparently and more efficiently, it’s incredibly motivating to think that these efforts might potentially help guard against corruption.
Hi all! Welcome to another installment of “Weekly Snapshot with Flickr Social”.
Every Friday we’re highlighting some of our favorite photos submitted to the Flickr Social group. For a chance to be featured, join the group and share your photos!
“V2. Vessel Panorama (B&W) – Hudson Yards, New York City. Panoramic view from inside the Vessel, at Hudson Yards in New York City. The Vessel is a structure and landmark which was built as part of the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project in Manhattan, New York City, New York. Construction began in April 2017; it opened on March 15, 2019.
Designed by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick, the elaborate honeycomb-like structure rises 16 stories and consists of 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings for visitors to climb.” –Andreas Komodromos
“Spring storm rolls over the Tri-Valley Area.” –Tanmay Sapkal
Be a part of this month’s Explore takeover
November’s Explore takeover we’re celebrating the most requested theme – animals! Check out a few photos shared this week and join the discussion for a chance to be featured!
“All the cool kids can touch their tongue to their nose.” –Marc J. Wrzesinski
“Moorland Pony – Dartmoor National Park.” –Carol Hales
“Hummingbird feeding 10 days old chicks.” –Natalia Morón
I’ve been reviewing Greg Wilson’s current book project, Software Design in Python. Like the earlier JavaScript-based Software Design by Example it’s a guided tour of tools, techniques, and components common to many software systems: testing frameworks, parsers, virtual machines, debuggers. Each chapter of each of these books shows how to build the simplest possible working version of one of these things.
Though I’ve used this stuff for most of my life, I’ve never studied it formally. How does an interpreter work? The chapter on interpreters explains the basic mechanism using a mixture of prose and code. When I read the chapter I can sort of understand what’s happening, but I’m not great at mental simulation of running code. I need to run the code in a debugger, set breakpoints, step through execution, and watch variables change. Then it sinks in.
The GitHub repo for the book includes all the text and all the code. I’d like to put them side-by-side, so that as I read the narrative I can run and debug the code that’s being described. Here’s how I’m doing that in VSCode.
This is pretty good! But it wasn’t dead simple to get there. In a clone of the repo, the steps included:
Find the HTML file for chapter 3.
Install a VSCode extension to preview HTML.
Find the code for chapter 3.
Adjust the code to not require command-line arguments.
Arrange the text and code in side-by-side panes.
Though it’s all doable, the activation threshold is high enough to thwart my best intention of repeating the steps for every chapter.
Whether in VSCode or another IDE or some other kind of app, what would be the best way to lower that activation threshold?
Years ago,
after I screwed up something important,
I defended myself by saying,
“I’m doing the best I can.”
My brother replied,
“Then try to do the best of someone better.”
When I said,
“Ouch,” he said,
“Because if you try and keep trying maybe you’ll become someone better.”
I seldom, if ever, write technical posts. There are just too many excellent resources out there and my goal isn’t to explain technical things to a technical audience, as much as I enjoy teaching from time to time, or giving the odd guest lecture.
But I made an exception whilst perusing the literature regarding Transformers, as in Large Language Models. This was motivated by research into the potential use of Transformers for a novel non-language use case. I wanted to experiment with a few ideas, so I decided to build a base of various notebooks and code libs from which to set out on my research path.
Secondarily, I wanted to ground myself in sufficient code-level mechanics to explore a set of questions I have about what, exactly, are Transformers doing in relation to semantics. This was for the purposes of attempting to understand how world models might get incorporated into LLM schemas, beginning with Transformers. Of course, this isn’t a novel question, but I need my own research bed.
There is also the interesting question as to why it is that depth (of Transformers) is a key indicator for modeling language performance (against the various benchmarks out there). I felt that by playing with the transformations, layer by layer, I might find insights and/or confirm various similar explorations already in the literature.
A question that also piqued my interest is to ask what would the opposite of a Large Language Model (LLM) look like, as in a “Small”, yet nonetheless still performant, LM. This was from the point of view of not only attempting to understand what a more parsimonious system might look like, but from the point of view of understanding the scope of independent research that might be achievable without Google or OpenAI resources ($$$$$).
Anyway, these are not the subjects of this blog post. Rather, this post is merely a link to a notebook that I published that is a more fine-grained explanation of an existing code-level explanation of an Encoder-Decoder Transformer (i.e. BERT-like).
Per the notebook intro:
I wanted to add some missing details to standard transformer annotations often found in courses and texts. But not wanting to reinvent the wheel with yet another explanation, the accompanying notebooks are mostly an expansion of Chapter 11 of the Dive Into Deep Learning open source book — a valuable resource for learners. (We are all learners.)
Jon Udell has written a short post
about his experience working through the Python version
of Software Design by Example.
He doesn’t jus want to read prose and code:
he wants to be able to run the code in a debugger
so he can step through and build a mental model of how it works.
Downloading the samples
figuring out how to run them on their own without command-line arguments,
and arranging things for side-by-side viewing is doable,
but as he says,
“…the activation threshold is high enough
to thwart my best intention of repeating the steps for every chapter.”
Tools like the Jupyter Notebook aren’t much help here:
for example,
they don’t provide a way
to have a cell containing just one method of a larger class
or just a few lines from a longer function
(which I frequently want to do for pedagogical reasons).
I did think about bundling a VSCode launch.json file with each chapter,
but that wouldn’t do anything to put the code side-by-side with the explanation.
What’s funny/not-funny is that these aren’t niche needs.
While JavaDoc-style comments or Python’s specially-formatted docstrings
are OK (but not great) for API documentation,
they’re a clumsy way to write long-form tutorials.
I’ve been stumbling over this problem for over thirty years,
and today’s solutions are only marginally better than what was available in 1989.
If you have one—one that will make authoring easier
while simultaneously allowing people like Jon to experience the lesson
in the IDE of their choice—please let me know.
Jeff Geerling@geerlingguy
I'm not planning on leaving Twitter or anything...
but if you want to keep up with what I do, I have this old scho… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Home Depot in Charlottetown has a vat of Ecosmart 60 watt-equivalent LED lightbulbs at the front of the store near the customer service desk, on sale for 98 cents each.
They give of a lovely warm light, and the rooms I’ve placed them in have been transformed from hospital-waiting-room to serious-hygge.
We do not sell any LED or CFL lamps to Home Depot, nor do we manufacture any lamps. We are a distributor. Home Depot simply uses a similar name to our website URL (www.ecosmartinc.com) for their private label lamps “Ecosmart”, made for them by several different manufacturers, none of whom are us.
Ryan Cousineau@rcousine
90s Don McKellar was quite something.
Highway 61
The Red Violin
Last Night
waydowntown
Those four movies formed… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
These are some posts collected from my Mastodon postings which together sort of form a coherent picture of the fediverse. Sort of.
So much fun watching tech people pour in from Twitter. Others, too, but
it's the tech people who interest me, because I remember when they were
doing interesting things 10, 15 years ago, before they were drawn into
the Twitter vortex. Now they're here full of new ideas and (at last!) on
a platform where they can implement them. But first, it's like watching
them in a new house, running to see all the rooms, marveling at the new
appliances. So much fun.
For my own part, while I never felt comfortable following people on
Twitter (because it was on such public display, with accumulating
followers the name of the game), here my approach has been different and
I'm following a lot of people as they come in. I can always prune my
follow list later if I feel like it. Right now I'm enjoying the rush of
reactions, the back-and-forth as people try to keep Mastodon a place
where people are nice, and the way things are still non-commercial and
non-huckster
- - -
It's interesting to compare the rush into the fediverse today with the land rush into Google+ when it first opened in 2011: a similar excitement, but beyond that the two events felt very different.
In Google+ it felt like a land rush. The first people in were influencers (ie., people who wrote for web publications like Slate and HuffPost, etc) jumping on keywords and community names in an effort to be first in a subnetwork, to benefit from network effects, and create huge numbers of followers.
Here, the influencers have been mostly absent. Mastodon isn't a place to build massive follower lists. It's like people are landing in the environment and then looking around for their friends, people they knew from bird site or even the days of RSS, and reconnecting.
The difference, to me, is that the fediverse is a sphere of abundance, while sites like Google+ were spheres of scarcity. Preferential attraction doesn't work the same here; the advantage to being first in isn't so great.
Scarcity drives hoarding. That's why collecting followers was so important in G+. Or birdsite, wherever. There was only one social graph, one social network, and if you weren't successful in it, you weren't successful in the platform as a whole.
But there's no scarcity of network in the fediverse. It's not just one big network, it's a network of networks (an 'internet', if you will). There's no one centre. Anyone can start a node.
Mass in a decentralized network is a weakness, not a strength.
- - -
This is just me, but I would ask, if you're going to link to a paywalled
article, please tell me it's a $paywall in your toot. Otherwise, it
wastes everyone's time and amounts to no more than an advertisement for a
commercial publisher. Thank you. :)
- - -
The way the fediverse works is different from the way trad social media works.
We don't all follow the same account. No megaphones here.
Rather, some people follow it, and if there's anything of note, they pass it along to their friends.
And so on, through layers of friends, each acting as a filter, adding commentary or perspective as needed.
Thus the network protects itself from misinformation, objectionable content, and cascade effects.
Japanese roads often have different rules between bicycles and cars, such as a bicycle being allowed
to go against traffic on many one-way roads, or a bicycle being prohibited from certain road sections.
However, the related traffic signage can be confusing even for Japanese natives.
Making it even more confusing is that certain kinds of situations have different signage in different parts of the
country.
This article goes into some of the details as I understand them (which is imperfect, for sure).
First of all, under Japanese law, a bicycle is a vehicle, just as a
car is a vehicle, so traffic signs and traffic laws fully apply to bicycles. For example, it's
illegal for any vehicle, including bicycles, to travel on a sidewalk... unless, of course, there's
signage or local ordinance explicitly allowing some kinds of vehicles, as is often the case for bicycles on sidewalks. Bicycles are vehicles under the law.
(This means, among much else, that bicycles must come to a complete and full stop at stop signs, may not cross red lights, must
yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks, and must stop at railroad tracks not controlled by a traffic light. I know cyclists who
have been stopped by police for some of these infractions.)
Let's look at some of the basic road signs to recognize as a cyclist.
Signs that explicitly prohibit bicycles
Road Closed to all, even pedestrians.
no bicycles
No Vehicle Access to all vehicles.
no bicycles
No Entrance to all vehicles.
no bicycles
Motor Vehicles Only (sort of)
bicycles definitely not allowed
No Bicycles that means you
No Non-Motorized Vehicles including bicycles
Pedestrians Only no bicycles
Any of the signs above, unless augmented by additional clarifying signage, mean that you officially can't use the road while
riding a bicycle (though in practice things may be different, so don't base your understanding of the
law on what you observe others do).
For example, consider the two blue signs above: in practice if you ride in a “Pedestrians Only” zone, it's may be that no one will care, but if you ride
on a “Motor Vehicles Only” road, you can expect to be stopped very quickly by someone acting in an official capacity.
On the other hand, these restrict others but not bicycles:
Bicycles Only bicycles okay
Pedestrians and Bicycles Only bicycles okay Common for sidewalks
No Motor Vehicles except two-wheel vehicles bicycles okay
No Motor Vehicles (sort of) bicycles okay
No Non-Motorized Vehicles Except Bicycles bicycles okay
Among the various uncommon signs that impact bicycles, I wanted to point this one out:
Riding side-by-side allowed
Without the benefit of this sign, riding bicycles side by side is illegal. If you're in the middle of nowhere and you're
not impacting cars, no one will care, but if you ride side-by-side on a busy street, holding up traffic behind you, you are
wrong. Some cyclists I've met act as if they own the road and that the rules, whatever they are, don't apply to them. Don't be
that jerk. If it doesn't bother anyone, sure, do whatever you like, but if you're going to break the law, at least don't be
inconsiderate to others.
Anywway, all the signs above might seem confusing enough, but it gets worse. Much, much worse.
Here's a common set of signs seen in my part of the country, where a one-way road empties into another:
One Way · Do Not Enter
unless you're a bicycle, in which case feel free to enter
Let's look at the signs in detail:
Generally speaking, traffic signs inform of a restriction of some sort — here we have “no entrance”
and “one way” —
but a restriction can be made more specific by additional little signs under it
called 「補助標識」 (“subsignage”, hojo hyoushiki). In this case, both
have the subsignage 「自転車を除く」
(“except bicycles”, jitennsha wo nozoku) under them, so these restrictions do not apply to bicycles. This road is not “one way” for bicycles, and they may travel either direction.
Some parts of Japan use different signage for essentially the same thing; we'll look at that later.
Here's a common sign that prohibits bicycles where most other vehicles may go:
No Bicycles or Other Non-Motorized Vehicles
though disallowed only from 8am to 9pm
This might at first seem as if it prohibits “bicycles and hand carts”, but on road signage,
the hand-cart symbol officially signifies “non-motorized vehicles except bicycles”, so the above sign
really means “no bicycles and no non-motorized vehicles except bicycles”.
In other words, it means what in English we would express by “motorized vehicles only”. So why isn't it expressed that way? Welcome to Japanese traffic law, which often comes across as if Yoda wrote
it while trying to parody himself. Oh, are pedestrians allowed? Unlikely, because there's a wide sidewalk here.
Mystifying. In any case, bicycles not allowed.
Here's the same sign (without the time limitation), and with an additional “no pedestrians” sign:
No Bicycles, Other Non-Motorized Vehicles, or Pedestrians
The same “no bicycles, no other non-motorized vehicles” sign makes an appearance here:
Lots of Signs
In the top center of the photo, one sign sort of sticking out to the right prohibits motorcycles from using the right lane, and
though a bit blurry in this photo, our “no bicycles, no other non-motorized vehicles” sign is near it, also applying only to the right
lane.
Oddly, pedestrians are restricted from the left lane but not the right, implying that pedestrians should use the right lane,
which doesn't fit the vibe of this area which is that pedestrians shouldn't be here in the first place. I'm probably missing
something important here.
An even bigger restriction — “motor vehicle only” — is used for highways and tollways:
In the photo above, the multiple sets of circle-with-a-slash restrictions (one each for “no
scooters”, “no bicycles”, and “no pedestrians”) placed on the left side of the road are just an extra
kindness likely placed at this specific location because they had a lot of trouble here; the heavy
lifting is actually done by the small circular blue sign a bit farther in the distance:
Motor Vehicles Only
(sort of)
(The small sign under the round blue one in this case is not one that makes the restriction more specific, but simply spells out that the road is a high-speed national motorway, and notes parenthetically that it's a toll road.)
I added “sort of” to the “Motor Vehicles Only” caption above because of quirks in how a Japanese legal term is translated to
daily English. We'll see details later, but in this case I couldn't use this road with my 125cc scooter, even though in common
English we'd consider it a motor vehicle.
Let's see another style of restriction:
The red circle on white with a slash means “closed to vehicles”, but there's a little clarifying sign under:
The small sign says 「原付・小特・軽車両」, limiting the “closed to vehicles” restriction to just the three classes of vehicle listed,
which roughly speaking encompasses “scooters, small farm equipment, and non-motorized vehicles”. Bicycles are non-motorized vehicles, so bicycles
may not enter this road.
This may seem complicated, but it's actually much more complicated than it looks.
Broadly speaking, Japanese law divides all vehicles into one of three main classes:
(Excluded: wheelchairs, walking aids, and toy vehicles for children are not legally “vehicles” at all)
原動機付自転車 gendoukituki jitensha
“Motor-Attached Bicycle”
Common shorthand: 原付 (gentsuki)
Mopeds and scooters and motorcycles with a “small enough” engine displacement
those with an engine displacement of 50cc or less (some parts of the law)
those with an engine displacement of 125cc or less (other parts of the law)
自動車 jidousha
“Motor Vehicle”
(sort of)
Non-rail motorized vehicles not accounted for above
cars, trucks, cranes, buses, farm equipment, motorcycles with “big enough” engines, construction equipment, etc.
(Trains and other rail vehicles are covered by totally different laws.)
Each class has a myriad of subclasses, some of which you may encounter on signs.
Let's revisit the “scooters, small farm equipment, and non-motorized vehicles”
sign from above:
「原付・小特・軽車両」
原付 (gentsuki) — short for 「原動機付自転車」, the broad “motor-attached bicycle” class seen above.
小特 (shotoku) — short for 「小型特殊自動車」, “small special motorized vehicle”, a sub-class of the broad “motor vehicle” class seen above,
encompassing things like farm equipment and construction equipment that fall within certain maximum limits of size, power, and speed.
軽車両 (keisharyo) — the broad non-motorized “light vehicle” class seen above, which includes bicycles.
Sometimes it seems as if it requires a PhD in both language and logic to figure out some signs. Consider this example from
my blog a decade ago:
Can you figure it out exactly what the restriction is? See the article for the convoluted answer.
The ones above are convoluted but with some effort those who read Japanese can figure them out. But sometimes it's just impossible to understand the meaning without knowing the specific rules of precedence and association that dictate what
parts of the signs applies to what other parts:
Pedestrians Only
except bicycles
5pm-5am
except Sundays and holidays
8-9:30am
Noon-1pm
I brought this photo to a police station and had a fairly-senior-looking officer explain in detail
what this meant. Later, I happened to come across a few traffic officers
manning a speed trap and asked them, and got another detailed explanation... quite different from the first!
(All the officers I talked to said that the sign was horrible.)
Explanation 1
Pedestrians only, but bicycles allowed.
This restriction against other vehicles applies only in the evening (5pm through to 5am),
meaning that cars etc. can use the road during the day (5am through to 5pm).
Also, the restriction doesn't apply during the two short periods on Sundays and holidays.
Explanation 2
Pedestrians only, but bicycles allowed from 5pm through to 5am.
Also, on weekdays, these restrictions also apply during two short additional periods.
These are completely different (!!) and probably neither are correct. If those charged to enforce these kinds of signs have no idea what they really mean, how
can average citizens?
Let's see whether we can figure it out.... (Hint: we can't)
The separator line above “except Sundays and holidays” seems to strongly indicate that the three lines below it (“except Sundays
and holidays”, “8-9:30am”, and “Noon-1pm”) all go together, but the question is how do they combine and apply to the
overall restriction? The double and triple negatives make my head spin. Is it that the restriction is in force only during the two
time slots, but not at all on Sundays and holidays, or is it that on weekdays the restriction applies only during the two time slots? My current guess would be the latter, but ask me tomorrow and I might come to a different conclusion.
And then there's that separator between “except bicycles” and “5pm-5am”, making me feel that those lines don't go together and
that each applies to the overall restriction independently. That's what we see in Explanation 1. But if so, why would they use
“pedestrians only” with an “except
bicycles” modifier when there's a perfectly good “pedestrians and bicycles only” sign? Maybe that's just the way they do things: I came across
a standalone “pedestrians only” with an “except
bicycles” modifier just today. It makes no sense to me.
All that being said, how does the “5pm-5am” line combine with the bottom half of the sign? Does the bottom half add to the
“5pm-5am” on some days, or replace it on those days?
The relevant Japanese law (around 第2章 第3-8(6)ア in this PDF) says that separator lines may be used for clarification,
but it doesn't seem to help in this case.
Sigh, I have no idea.
For reference, here's a case where no black-separator line is used, but it's clear:
NO ENTRANCE
except bicycles
all day
300m ahead
Here's another example not uncommon in my area:
This is a standard “No Entrance” sign, with the little sign under limiting the restriction to 「自動車」(most motor-vehicles except
some scooters), but then the parenthetical 「二輪を除く」removes all motorcycles from the restriction. So, all motorized
two-wheeled vehicles and all non-powered vehicles (which includes bicycles) can go both ways.
Some Extra Notes
Vehicles that would seem to belong to one category can actually be placed in another, depending on a variety of special conditions.
For example, a “pedal-assist” bicycle, which has a motor to assist the user while pedaling, but won't propel the vehicle otherwise,
can legally be a “bicycle” if the motor is weak enough.
In the law (and on traffic signs),「自転車」(“bicycle”) has a specific legal meaning that includes specifications on size and on the
number and type of people it's designed to accommodate. Generally, it's what one would consider a “normal” bicycle. But note that a tandem
bicycle — a bicycle designed for two or more operators — is not legally a “bicycle”, so it falls into the general non-motorized “light vehicle” category. We'll see later an example of where this can be an
important distinction.
However, each prefecture has its own laws about tandem bicycles, mentioned in short in this Wikipedia page. Tandem bicycles had been generally prohibited on roads until recently, but as of this writing most such restrictions have been removed.
Electric vehicles of all sorts, other than the pedal-assist bicycle just mentioned (and mobility-assist devices, etc. that
are not legally a vehicle), generally fall into one of the motorized-vehicle categories, all of which
requires a valid driver's license to operate, and proper vehicular licensing to use on public roads.
This (currently) includes even weakly-powered vehicles like electric skateboards, hoverboards, and electric kick scooters, though
as of this writing the law is slated to change to allow unlicensed use of these kinds of things. We'll see.
The moment you dismount your bicycle and push it while walking, you are now a pedestrian and the bike is just
something you have with you. This is a special rule that does not apply to most other non-motorized vehicles, such as push carts
and rickshaw and parade floats, which are initially designed to be pushed or pulled, and so are “vehicles” under all conditions.
Three-wheeled vehicles are placed into categories depending on a variety of factors, including size, whether they have an engine (and how powerful the engine is, and how it is interacted with), maximum powered speed, etc. Depending on these, they can be placed into any of the broad vehicle categories.
Trivia: ask the average Japanese person what 「軽車両」(keisharyo) refers to, and instead of
the correct answer (“the broad class encompassing non-motorized vehicles, including bicycles”), you'll likely hear the definition
for 「軽自動車」(keijidousha), which is a sub-class of automobile meeting certain size and engine restrictions that enjoys beneficial taxation and parking, and can be identified by the fact that their license plates use a black/yellow color scheme, instead of the normal white/green.
In some prefectures, bicycles are allowed in both directions on most one-way streets in this way:
Here, the modifier signs say 「自動車・原付」, which as we saw above are
the two motorized broad category of vehicles, meaning that the restrictions do not apply to the third, the non-motorized
“light vehicle” category, which of course includes bicycles. So,
bicycles can ride either direction.
As you'll recall, in my area the restrictions exempt only bicycles, but here all non-motorized vehicles are exempted. The difference between the two are all the other (non-bicycle) non-motorized vehicles, such as tandem
bicycles, tricycles, unicycles, etc. In my area, they are limited by the one-way sign, but in the area
of the photo above, they can travel both ways. What a weird local difference.
One last thing to note is the difference between these similar signs:
Road Closed to all, even pedestrians
No Vehicle Access to all vehicles (including bicycles)
No Stopping
No Parking
If you made it this far, congratulations; you're ready to ride.
Mostly I wish this paper (37 page PDF) went into more depth on the different dimensions of microcredentials in this literature review. The authors make the point that the concept is not new, because short courses and programs have been around for a long time. The renewed emphasis is new, though, but varies across cultures: in Europe, the focus is on lifelong learning, while in the Americas and Asia-Pacific, the focus is on employability. Questions also arise regarding the role of providers, and whether microcredentials are part of a movement to replace public education with private providers (I'm paraphrasing quite a bit here). The paper is presented in English and Spanish.
A B.C. judge has found a Chilliwack pastor "liable" for holding a worship service in breach of the province's old COVID-19 orders — but a conviction for a $2,300 ticket won't be entered until the court has considered a constitutional challenge.
In a decision with implications for a number of similar cases, Judge Andrea Ormiston found that while Free Reformed Church pastor John Koopman may not have organized the Dec. 6, 2020 event, he could be considered a "host" of the service, which contravened a public health order.
Despite the guilty finding, Ormiston held off entering a conviction last week — pending a challenge to the legislation that made the gathering illegal.
A spokesperson for the organization backing Koopman and other church leaders ticketed during the mandate says the ruling is part of a multitude of proceedings that continue to clutter the courts long after the order was dropped.
"It doesn't leave a good taste in citizens' mouths when they have gone through the legal processes and seen years of public resources expended against them for choices that had nothing to do with causing any additional health risk," said Marty Moore, a lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.
'A divine call that cannot be ignored'
While the Crown dropped two dozen COVID-19 violation tickets against Koopman and two other pastors last spring, Moore said more than a dozen remain and are currently being contested in provincial court.
The worship service at the heart of the case was held two days after Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry issued an order prohibiting people from organizing or hosting a long list of events, including in-person worship services.
According to Ormiston's ruling, an RCMP officer "believed that a worship service was going to be held at the church that morning based on information from the church's public website."
The officer was prevented from going inside, but saw others being admitted. He later downloaded a video of Koopman's service.
"During the sermon, pastor Koopman directly addresses the controversy of gathering in person to worship at that time," the judge wrote. "As he said then, and as he explained in his testimony during this trial, coming together to serve God is a compulsion — a divine call that cannot be ignored or superseded by laws of the state."
Ormiston's ruling largely deals with the question of whether Koopman could be considered an organizer or a host.
The pastor successfully argued he was not an organizer, because his role is "intentionally removed from the administrative work of operating a church."
But the judge found his role consistent with being a "host" who in "some way provides for the comfort and well-being of their guests even if they do not involve themselves with making the necessary arrangements."
Moore said the distinction means Koopman will face a $2,300 fine as opposed to $230 for someone who simply attended — depending on the next step in the legal process.
Challenges at all 3 levels of court
Challenges to the legislation that enabled Henry to issue her mandates are now before all three levels of B.C. courts.
In addition to Koopman's challenge in provincial court, the Court of Appeal is reconsidering a B.C. Supreme Court ruling that found while the top doctor's orders may have infringed on religious freedoms, she was justified in issuing them.
Meanwhile, Moore said his group is asking a B.C. Supreme Court judge for a review of a September provincial court decision in which a Kelowna pastor lost his bid to mount a similar challenge to the one likely to be made in the Koopman case.
In that decision, Judge Clarke Burnett found Art Lucier was trying to make an "impermissible collateral attack" on the public health legislation because the law sets out a specific route for people who object to an order.
Lucier argued that this reconsideration process was "flawed and insufficient." The judge agreed that it may not have been "robust" but said the right to appeal clearly existed — as did the right to a judicial review after that.
"The intention of the legislature was that only those individuals with the appropriate training and qualifications should be tasked with ascertaining the merits of any reconsideration," Burnett wrote.
"To have another body do so may well undermine the primary objective of the legislation, being the protection of the public from health hazards."
'A reasonable and proportionate balance'
Koopman's next court date is Dec. 21.
Moore says the legal proceedings are timely in light of considerations about the need for mask mandates to combat the spread of new strains of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
"If we choose to engage the legal resources of our communities — policing, prosecution and judges — with the use of mandates, we can expect to have much less of those resources available to meet the other more pressing needs of our community," Moore said.
"I think that is something within the public interest to be considered."
In all cases, the province has argued that orders infringing the rights of Canadians were necessary to control the spread of a deadly virus that prompted a state of emergency.
In the decision now before the appeal court, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson echoed that sentiment.
""Although the impacts of the ... orders on the religious petitioners' rights are significant, the benefits to the objectives of the orders are even more so," Hinkson wrote.
"In my view, the orders represent a reasonable and proportionate balance.''
When I was an analyst I would appear on TV news programs from time to time. The production staff would sometimes refer to “the talent” (for example, “Have you miked the talent yet?”). It took a moment for me to understand that I was “the talent.” The thing about the talent is that if you … Continued
When I pulled out my Cotopaxi Allpa 35L backpack before a three-day trip for my friend’s wedding in Utah, I was skeptical that everything I needed to bring would fit. In theory, a weekend’s worth of clothes shouldn’t be a problem for one of our recommended weekend bags, but I was planning to pack heavy. Not only would I need to cram a bulky velvet bridesmaid dress, several pairs of heels, every hot hair tool I own, and my entire stash of toiletries into the Cotopaxi Allpa, but I also needed to pack clothes warm enough for the snowy forecast at my destination.
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