Rants – Page 13 – a sibilant intake of breath

Concept for making use of Google’s ‘Inactive Account Manager’ feature

Presumably after considering the consequences of doing so, Google has become a sort of unusual executor of the digital estates of users who opt in to their ‘Inactive Account Manager’ feature.

They are given the option to set how long a ‘timeout period’ must pass before the system kicks in.

They are then allowed to automatically notify and potentially share data with up to 10 “trusted friends or family members”.

They can then add an autoresponder message, either for anyone who emails them or just for contacts.

Finally, they can set up a system to delete their account.

In a way, this looks a lot like a Dead man’s switch.

The concept

This system relies upon the autoresponder feature.

If you have data that you wish to make publicly available only after your death, encrypt it with a secure-yet-commonly-used algorithm like AES.

Put the key in the body of your Google post-mortem autoresponse email.

In all likelihood, the key will circulate and people will be able to decrypt the files which you wish for them to decrypt.

I am sure Google thought this through, but it seems to me that this system might encourage suicides. There can be a certain attraction in going out by means of a dramatic gesture, and this system makes it a lot easier.

In which I continue to have no time for fun

An extremely preliminary version of the Toronto 350.org divestment brief has been pulled together.

Now to work on the second version of my self deception paper (due Tuesday), a new paper on globalization for my Canadian politics core seminar (due Thursday), my forthcoming presentation on the patriation of Canada’s constitution (the 26th), and my two term papers.

I also need to sort out the details of moving out of Massey and into cheaper accommodation for the summer.

iTunes updates

The decision of whether or not to update iTunes is always a wary one for me.

On the one hand, it is possible they are patching essential security bugs that are leaving one or more of my devices vulnerable.

On the other, it is likely that the update will include at the very least a gratuitous and confusing user interface change, and at most will be another transformation in the functioning of the whole program. I don’t want to need to learn new software every time Apple decides to mix things up again, and they have an unfortunate habit of eliminating good features and introducing deliberately frustrating ones.

Now a last-minuter

From a time-management perspective, I seem to have become a much worse student since my undergrad days.

Right now, I am on a computer in my study working on drafts of two papers simultaneously (one due tomorrow, one due Thursday). Occasionally, I am drifting back to the well-lit zone in my bedroom to do the readings on which these two papers are ostensibly based.

Peppering all of these tasks are asides in which I make note of things to discuss at tomorrow’s 350 meeting and try to schedule this week’s remaining obligations.

Mid-February meltdown

Somehow, this coming week is shaping up to be even more insane than the weeks so far this term.

I have to grade all the papers from my international relations students by Thursday (after re-reading the papers they are based on), as well as do the reading for this week’s tutorials and teach them on Monday.

I have two papers of my own to write: a book review for my ‘incomplete conquests’ class and a paper for my Canadian politics core seminar on: “Does the Canadian study of federalism suffer from too much or too little theory?” (I don’t even know what that means!)

I have two sections of the Toronto350.org divestment brief due tomorrow, hundreds of emails to answer (as always), two term paper topics to decide on and begin researching, the Toronto350.org Termly General Meeting on Tuesday night, and all the ordinary reading for next week’s three classes.

I also need to send my 24-70 lens back to Canon because, in fixing the fall damage, they broke the autofocus/manual focus switch. Plus, there is lots of routine stuff that has piled up, like six issues of The Economist to read.

Canada’s Liberals and NDP should merge

Can the Liberals and the NDP please just merge already?

Source: ThreeHundredEight.com

The Liberal and New Democratic parties have now spent years operating under the apparent assumption that the key issue is leadership and that if they can just find the right leader they will be able to form a government.

I think a much bigger problem is vote splitting. Different voters have the NDP, Liberals, and Greens as their top choice. Probably, the second-place preferences of these voters are also for one of those three parties. And yet, because votes get split between left-leaning parties, the Conservatives end up governing.

Arguably, it would be preferable to reform the electoral system, rather than respond to the united right by uniting the left. What this alternative proposal lacks is practicality: the federal Conservative Party is unlikely to replace an electoral system that has allowed them to govern with a minority of support for so long, and no other party is in a position to influence legislation.

Writing advice for undergraduates

I am in the middle of grading stacks of undergraduate essays. If I could give one piece of advice to the students, it would be that they should read their essays aloud to themselves when preparing the final version.

For each sentence, they should ask:

What is the argument I am trying to make with this sentence?
Do I make my point clearly?
Is there any way I can make the sentence simpler or more specific?

Most essays I have looked at have included sentences that no person would leave unchanged after reading them aloud. All the essays have featured sentences that are unnecessarily convoluted or too vague to express much of anything.

Particularly when your essay is destined to end up in a stack to be assessed by a grad student teaching assistant, it is essential to make sure that your sentences are comprehensible and advance the overall argument you are making.

Obama and Romney on fossil fuels

President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both think their best odds of winning the election arise from a full-throated endorsement of fossil fuels, with no mention of climate change:

Mr Obama’s energy policy goes beyond a new-found enthusiasm for oil and gas. He has even borrowed a phrase from the McCain-Palin campaign—“All of the above” (rather than “Drill, baby, drill”). “Most of the above” is more accurate. And it may hurt him. Clean Air Act rules administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are accelerating the retirement of coal-fired power stations while cheap gas eats away at coal’s share of electricity generation. This is the main reason that Kentucky and West Virginia, once states where the Democrats were competitive, have swung firmly to the Republicans. Mr Romney is far friendlier to coal mining, an industry he praises for employing 200,000 people. He wants to develop coal aggressively and roll back the environmental regulations that have battered it.

Hopefully both candidates are lying. That is fairly plausible when it comes to coal, which Mr. Romney also sought to restrict as governor of Massachusetts. The perceived need to pander to the coal industry is revealing. The immediate benefits of coal production – in the form of profits and jobs – completely overpower the reality that coal kills vast numbers of people through air pollution and threatens the entire world through climate change.

Justin Trudeau’s depressing perspective on the oil sands

Now running for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau said something especially depressing today:

“There’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there. There is not a province in this country that would find 170 billion barrels of oil and leave it in the ground.”

Days after Thomas Mulcair expressed support for an east-west oil sands pipeline, Trudeau’s comments demonstrate how virtually the entire spectrum of Canadian political opinion favours imposing dangerous and potentially catastrophic climate change on future generations, because today’s politicians cannot bear to forego the short-term profits associated with oil sands extraction. At a time when climate science is making it increasingly clear that we are putting humanity’s very existence at risk, our politicians lack the courage or the imagination to propose much other than the status quo: banking fossil fuel profits while ignoring the long-term consequences of our choices.

The ‘phone’ part of the iPhone can be very distracting

Sometimes, I wish I could uninstall the ‘Phone’ app from my iPhone. It’s amazing to be able to access email and websites from anywhere, without needing to rely on the availability of WiFi. It’s less amazing for people to be able to initiate immediate verbal communication with me at any time of day or night.

Between working as a TA and taking courses, I think it’s pretty difficult for doctoral students in the first couple of years to do much substantive reading and thinking about their thesis topic. In order to counter that, I am trying to do what I can to reduce the number of apparently urgent items popping up in my attention stream.

I wish the iPhone was a bit more granular in terms of which services you can turn off. It’s great that the iPhone has an ‘airplane mode‘ that kills both access to the cellular network and access to WiFi. It’s also great that you can turn on airplane mode with WiFi enabled (for internet access with no phone calls or text messages). I wish you could allow the phone to use the cellular network for email and web browsing but disable it for text messages and phone calls.