Geek stuff – Page 22 – a sibilant intake of breath

What if?

My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:

The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.

Tour of Ottawa sights

My Saturday in Ottawa involved a rather comprehensive trek.

Beginning at the home of my friends Andrea and Mehrzad, I walked up Booth Street – past the first apartment I rented in town and the War Museum – and across the Chaudiere Bridge to the Terrasses de la Chaudière complex which includes Environment Canada headquarters.

On the Quebec side, I then walked to the Museum of Civilization, which has been rebranded by the Harper government as the Canadian Museum of History. I then crossed the Alexandra bridge back into Ontario, putting me near the National Gallery. I walked through Major’s Hill Park and crossed the Rideau Canal near the Chateau Laurier. I then entered Parliament Hill, walking the scenic northern edge, looking out over all the major government buildings of the National Capital Region.

I carried on west, walking around the Supreme Court, before heading east again to buy a ticket for the guided tour of Centre Block. While near Parliament Hill, I had a peek at the building where I used to work for the Privy Council Office, along with the Blackburn Building (home of the PCO library) and the Langevin Block (home of the Prime Minister’s Office).

I then walked through the downtown core, mostly along Bank Street, getting a peek at the new Venus Envy location before diverting west down Somerset. I also had a quick peek at the headquarters of the Department of Finance and Treasury Board Secretariat. I also talked to some not-especially-interested salespeople at Henry’s cameras about the relative merits of the 6D and 5D Mk III.

All through the walk, I was struck by how small a place Ottawa is. Having spent five years working there, every neighbourhood is peppered with memories and (at least on a pleasant summer’s day) they can all be walked to quite easily.

I walked down Somerset all the way back to the Booth neighbourhood and said hello to Andrea’s hilarious dogs before following the river back to Parliament Hill for my tour. The guided tour included the elegant corridors and atriums of Centre Block, committee rooms, the senate, and the extremely beautiful Library of Parliament.

After the tour, I walked up Elgin Street, passing the pub where I used to do trivia on a team of tax economists on Tuesday nights. I headed south to the Museum of Nature before having a look at the much-developed Beaver Barracks complex where I used to live. I then walked back to Bank Street and south through The Glebe to the redeveloped Landsdowne Park.

From there, I visited the Bank Street canal bridge and wandered along the canal and through neighbourhoods as far as Dow’s Lake, before making my way back to Andrea’s via the Natural Resources Canada complex on Booth Street.

Bombardier turboprop

Peter John sums up

“A synthetic approach implies there are multiple causes of policy change and variation. Accounts that rely on one process to explain why decision making takes a particular course are too narrow and relegate other factors to some dominant principle. The common view of contemporary social scientists is that there is no one general principle governing social and political life. Instead, social scientists need to make sense of the complexity, variation, and changeability of the empirical world, which is constituted by conflicting ideas. As such, theories of policy variation and change must incorporate and account for continuous change and adoption. It is not possible to say that only institutions count, or that social and political phenomena can be reduced to economic drivers. Policy outputs and outcomes are the result of a confluence of the five processes [institutions, groups, exogenous factors, rational actors, and ideas] that the book outlines in chapters 3 to 7.

There are three sets of authors who try to synthesize these factors. They are Sabatier (policy advocacy coalition theory), Kingdon (the policy streams approach), and Baumgartner and Jones (the punctuated equilibrium model). The first seeks to combine ideas and networks in public policy, where policy subsystems are driven and sometimes fractured by large socioeconomic or external events. The second is based on the continual interplay of problems, solutions, and policies in the garbage can model of policy choice. The third is a model of agenda setting, seeking to describe how agendas and policies move fro periods of high stability to times of rapid change and fluidity. All three models are contemporary because they place ideas at the center of their analysis. The time when writers believed that only interests drive public policy is now over. Conceptions, discourse, beliefs, and norms define the process of policy making. Yet unlike some of the ideational theories described in chapter 7, Sabatier, Kingdon, and Baumgartner and Jones seek to place ideas with the complex interplay of individual choice, networks, institutions, and socioeconomic changes. Thus each framework has all these elements.

In keeping with the critical approach of this book, none of these authors quite succeeds in creating a theory of public policy. For all the role of knowledge and advocacy in Sabatier’s approach, the policy advocacy coalition framework is too static, as it is driven by outside events. Kingdon’s approach is highly attractive, but it relies too much on change and fluidity. Baumgartner and Jones neatly contrast stability and instability in the account of policy making over time, but in the end it is not entirely clear that they explain the transition between stability and change and back again.”

John, Peter. Analyzing Public Policy: Second Edition. 2012. p. 176 (hardcover)

Fixing the apostrophe with two marks for two purposes

Both for people who are new to English and for life-long speakers, one of the most consistently confusing aspects of the language is the apostrophe.

There^†s a pretty straightforward reason for this, I think, and it^†s one that could be addressed fairly easily if people are willing to consider a minor linguistic change. There are two main uses for the apostrophe:

Indicating possession, as in: “The cat’s bed is beside the dog’s bed, on the floor between Carol’s bed and Peter’s bed” and
Indicating a contraction, as in: “I’ve noticed there’s not a lot of time ’til Christmas”

This dual use is most problematic insofar as it causes it’s/its errors. People are naturally used to seeing the apostrophe as a marker for possession, so “The dog is vexed by it’s fleas” seems intuitive.

A simple solution would be to use two different marks for the two different purposes. Since possession seems to be the use that is most intuitive for people, I would suggest using the new mark for contractions. A superscript dagger wouldn^†t change the look of printed text too much. Furthermore, the character is already included in nearly all typefaces, and isn^†t widely used for any purpose that isn^†t equally well served by a numbered footnote. People who chose to make the change wouldn^†t confuse people excessively, and English’s reputation as an incoherent hodgepodge of a language might be somewhat mitigated.

The problems with apostrophes also connect to the awkward issues involved in indicating plurality and possession for words the always end in ‘s’, over which there is no agreement even among pedantic language experts. Using two punctuation marks wouldn^†t settle that, but it may help reduce the odds of error.

Memory games

My new hobby (in the shower, while walking, while waiting for anything) – mentally listing public policy scholars and their best-known contributions:

Haas – epistemic communities
Kingdon – policy windows
Skogstad – economic globalization v. political internationalization
Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith – the advocacy coalition framework
Downs, Olson, Arrow – rational choice
Green and Shapiro – critics of rational choice
Howlett, Ramesh, Perl – summarizers of everything
Harden and Ostrum – analysts of tragedies of the commons
Jones – bounded rationality
Lindblom – muddling through
Tversky and Kahneman – framing
Tsebelis – nested games, veto points
Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos – philosophy of science
Pierson – policy feedbacks
Hall – policy paradigms

Etc, etc

These facts will not be on the exam

I was wrong a while ago when I said the QI podcast isn’t available through the iTunes Store. It simply doesn’t have a name that makes it obvious that it is the QI podcast: No Such Thing As A Fish.

One nice fact is that Lawrence Burst Sperry, the man who invented the aircraft autopilot, went flying in November 1916 with Mrs. Waldo Polk, whose husband was off driving an ambulance in France. They counted on the autopilot to keep them aloft, but ended up crashing naked into a bay and being found by duck hunters.

Also, if you get a zebrafish drunk and put it among sober companions, the sober ones will follow the drunk one:

Maybe something about the drunk fish’s one-on-one interactions with the other fish made the group as a whole move in the same direction. Or maybe the sober fish looked at their non-sober tankmate and saw a leader. “It is likely,” Porfiri says, that the drunk fish’s uninhibited behavior “is perceived as a boldness trait, thus imparting a high social status.” As they followed the drunk fish, the sober ones also sped up to keep pace, swimming roughly a third faster than they would have otherwise.

The very drunkest zebrafish, though, lost their leader status. Fish that had been exposed to the highest alcohol concentration began to lag behind the rest of the group, following instead of steering. Since higher alcohol doses have “sedative effects,” Porfiri says, the drunkest fish slow down and start to display “sluggishness in response to the rest of the group.”

I listed some fun facts from QI in a previous post.

Method-driven versus problem-driven

It is our impression, however, that much rational choice theory is method driven rather than problem driven, and that this is partly responsible for its defects. Empirical science is problem driven when the elaboration of theories is designed to explain phenomena that arise in the world. Method-driven research occurs when a theory is elaborated without reference to what phenomena are to be explained, and the theorist subsequently searches for phenomena to which the theory in question can be applied.

Green, Doland and Ian Shapiro. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. 1994. p. 194 (hardcover)

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Living with a fifth limb

Both to feel a little less surveilled and to be subjected to fewer deviations from whatever stream of thought is ongoing, I often choose to leave my cell phone at home when going out.

The choice does serve those purposes but, whether my phone-side pocket is empty or stocked with some less intrusive object, I nonetheless feel periodic spontaneous sensations which can be interpreted as the buzz of text messages or email. It’s somewhat akin, perhaps, to the phantom limb syndrome experienced by those who have lost arms, legs, or digits. Once the brain has come to expect sensations from a particular part of the peripheral nervous system, it will sometimes introduce them by its own invention whether the genuine form is present or not.