Quotulatiousness

June 12, 2013

Federal government to go ahead with Pickering airport

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

As my house is directly under the most likely approach to the new airport, I suspect my property value is about to take a big dive:

After four decades, the long-standing controversial plan to build an airport on the Pickering Lands is scheduled for takeoff.

But that doesn’t mean residents are on board.

At a press conference held on the lands Tuesday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the 7,500 hectares of land in Pickering, Markham and Uxbridge will be transformed into a new airport and a 2,000-hectare Rouge National Urban Park.

“These lands were acquired by the government more than 40 years ago with the intention of developing an airport, but it never got off the ground,” Flaherty said. “The uncertainty ends today.”

The plan is to begin work immediately, he said. It will take at least 10 years to build the airport in the lower quadrant of the lands with Hwy. 7 and Brock Rd. as a southeastern boundary. No cost has yet been assigned to the construction of the airport.

Of course, our local politicians love it:

Durham Council chairman Roger Anderson said the airport will reduce congestion on Hwy. 401.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to drive to Mississauga to go to Ottawa?” Anderson said. “For us, it’s a big win. It will show the province Durham should get one job for every three, which we fought about for years and the other thing — It’s not only good for Durham, but for Scarborough and York and Markham.”

The Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade is also backing the airport proposal, but said it wants to study it in more detail and consult with members. The board has been advocating for congestion relief in Durham Region and said the airport would be “a game changer.”

I wonder how long it’ll take after it opens to become the new Mirabel?

It was intended to replace the existing Dorval Airport as the eastern air gateway to Canada; from 1975 to 1997, all international flights to/from Montreal were required to use Mirabel. However, Mirabel’s distant location and lack of transport links made it unpopular with airlines and travellers. Moreover, Montréal’s economic decline relative to Toronto kept passenger volumes from rising to the levels originally anticipated. And so Dorval Airport not only remained viable but resumed handling overseas flights. Eventually, Mirabel was relegated to the role of a cargo airport. Initially a source of pride, the airport became an embarrassment, widely regarded in Canada as being a boondoggle and a white elephant. Ironically, the Dorval Airport was renamed Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport after the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, whose government spearheaded the Mirabel project to replace Dorval.

For “ironically” in the Wikipedia description, read “deservedly”.

Changing the FDA to meet the new needs of personalized medicine

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok links to a new paper by Peter Huber:

In a brilliant new paper (pdf) (html) Peter Huber draws upon molecular biology, network analysis and Bayesian statistics to make some very important recommendations about FDA policy.

[. . .]

The current regime was built during a time of pervasive ignorance when the best we could do was throw a drug and a placebo against a randomized population and then count noses. Randomized controlled trials are critical, of course, but in a world of limited resources they fail when confronted by the curse of dimensionality. Patients are heterogeneous and so are diseases. Each patient is a unique, dynamic system and at the molecular level diseases are heterogeneous even when symptoms are not. In just the last few years we have expanded breast cancer into first four and now ten different types of cancer and the subdivision is likely to continue as knowledge expands. Match heterogeneous patients against heterogeneous diseases and the result is a high dimension system that cannot be well navigated with expensive, randomized controlled trials. As a result, the FDA ends up throwing out many drugs that could do good:

    Given what we now know about the biochemical complexity and diversity of the environments in which drugs operate, the unresolved question at the end of many failed clinical trials is whether it was the drug that failed or the FDA-approved script. It’s all too easy for a bad script to make a good drug look awful. The disease, as clinically defined, is, in fact, a cluster of many distinct diseases: a coalition of nine biochemical minorities, each with a slightly different form of the disease, vetoes the drug that would help the tenth. Or a biochemical majority vetoes the drug that would help a minority. Or the good drug or cocktail fails because the disease’s biochemistry changes quickly but at different rates in different patients, and to remain effective, treatments have to be changed in tandem; but the clinical trial is set to continue for some fixed period that doesn’t align with the dynamics of the disease in enough patients

    Or side effects in a biochemical minority veto a drug or cocktail that works well for the majority. Some cocktail cures that we need may well be composed of drugs that can’t deliver any useful clinical effects until combined in complex ways. Getting that kind of medicine through today’s FDA would be, for all practical purposes, impossible.

The alternative to the FDA process is large collections of data on patient biomarkers, diseases and symptoms all evaluated on the fly by Bayesian engines that improve over time as more data is gathered. The problem is that the FDA is still locked in an old mindset when it refuses to permit any drugs that are not “safe and effective” despite the fact that these terms can only be defined for a large population by doing violence to heterogeneity. Safe and effective, moreover, makes sense only when physicians are assumed to be following simple, A to B, drug to disease, prescribing rules and not when they are targeting treatments based on deep, contextual knowledge that is continually evolving

New disclosure rules for Canadian oil, gas, and mining companies

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:19

David Akin in the Toronto Sun:

The Canadian government announced new measures Tuesday that will force oil, gas, and mining companies to publicly disclose every penny they pay to any government at home or around the world.

The move is seen as an anti-corruption measure and one that many activists groups that work in the developing world, such as Oxfam, have been demanding for years, particularly since Canada is home to a majority of the world’s mining companies.

The European Union and the United States have already moved towards mandatory reporting requirements for their mining companies.

There have been cases in some developing countries where multinationals pay a host government substantial sums for the rights to oil, gas or minerals, but the local population complains that they do not know how much their governments are getting and, as a result, cannot demand their governments spend some of that wealth on them.

It’s not just in developing countries, either, as some First Nations activists have complained that they can’t get information on what their band councils receive in various resource development deals here in Canada. Of course, some (many?) deals get done with a bit of bribery to sweeten the attraction, but not every country will have (or enforce) rules like this.

June 11, 2013

New privacy options on Facebook

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Facebook's new privacy options

H/T to KA-CHING! for the image.

Remember the Canadian political scandals?

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

Andrew Coyne got the secret decoder ring from one of his readers:

The elephant in the IT room – who can you trust?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

At The Register, Trevor Pott explains why trust is the key part of your personal online security:

Virtually everything we work with on a day-to-day basis is built by someone else. Avoiding insanity requires trusting those who designed, developed and manufactured the instruments of our daily existence.

All these other industries we rely on have evolved codes of conduct, regulations, and ultimately laws to ensure minimum quality, reliability and trust. In this light, I find the modern technosphere’s complete disdain for obtaining and retaining trust baffling, arrogant and at times enraging.

Let’s use authentication systems as a fairly simple example. Passwords suck, we all know they suck, and yet the majority of us still try to use easy to remember (and thus easy to crack) passwords for virtually everything.

The use of password managers and two-factor authentication is on the rise, but we have once more run into a classic security versus usability issue with both technologies.

[. . .]

Trust as a design principle

The technosphere doesn’t think like this. Very few design their products around trust, or the lack thereof. We’ve become obsessed with how the technology works and what that technology can enable; technology is easy, people are hard. How the technology we create integrates into the larger reality of politics, law, emotion and the other people-centric elements, is often overlooked.

In some cases it is simply a matter of having a limited target audience; American firms designing for American users, for example. It is impossible for most to really understand the intricacies of trust issues in all their variegated permutations. It is human to be limited in our vision, and scope of understanding.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

“Who hired this goofball?”

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Jim Geraghty talks about Edward Snowden and the NSA:

Everybody’s going to have an opinion on Edward Snowden, today the world’s most famous leaker.

In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of people talking past each other, conflating two issues: one, did he do the right thing by disclosing all these details of the vast NSA system to gather data on Americans? And two, should he be prosecuted for it?

Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.

[. . .]

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn’t recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he’s the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over — completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation — and concluding, “yup, looks like a nice kid?”

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego — one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex.)

Snowden feels he has an understanding of what’s going on well beyond most of his colleagues:

    When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.

What’s more, he feels that no one listens to his concerns or takes them seriously:

    And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you’re ignored. The more you’re told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”

My God, he must have been an insufferable co-worker.

    ‘Look, you guys just don’t understand, okay? You just can’t grasp the moral complexities of what I’m being asked to do here! Nobody here really gets what’s going on, or can see the big picture when you ask me to do something like that!’

    ‘Ed, I just asked if you could put a new bottle on the water cooler when you get a chance.’

Update: Politico put together a fact sheet on what we know about Edward Snowden. It’s best summed up by Iowahawk:

Federal government denies collecting electronic data on Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Oh, well, if the government denies doing something I guess they pretty much have to be telling the truth, right? Unfortunately, the photo accompanying this Toronto Star article doesn’t show if Peter MacKay is crossing the fingers on his left hand:

The Conservative government flatly denies Canadian spy agencies are conducting any unauthorized electronic snooping operations.

After facing questions from the NDP Opposition about how far he has authorized Ottawa’s top secret eavesdropping spy agency to go, a terse Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay left the Commons, telling the Star: “We don’t target Canadians, okay.”

A former Liberal solicitor general says that doesn’t mean other allied spy agencies don’t collect information on Canadians and share it with the Canadian spying establishment.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who was minister responsible for the spy agency CSIS in 2002-03, told the Star that in the post-9/11 era a decade ago it was common for Canada’s allies to pass on information about Canadians that they were authorized to gather but Ottawa wasn’t.

The practice was, in effect, a back-door way for sensitive national security information to be shared, not with the government, but Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and, if necessary, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSEC is a new bit of alphabet soup in the public sphere … I’d never heard of the organization until yesterday. Tonda MacCharles explains what the agency is empowered to do:

The CSEC, an agency that is rarely in the public eye, has far-reaching national security powers to monitor and map electronic communication signals around the globe.

It is forbidden by law to target or direct its spying on Canadians regardless of their location anywhere in the world, or at any person in Canada regardless of their nationality.

The National Defence Act says CSE may, however, unintentionally intercept Canadians’ communications, but must protect their privacy in the use and retention of such “intercepted information.” The agency’s “use” of the information is also restricted to cases where it is “essential to international affairs, defence or security.”

CSEC’s job is to aid federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the military, in highly sensitive operations. It was a key component of Canadian operations in Afghanistan, for example.

As if a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough things to worry about…

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

…there’s an entire industry devoted to the cause of warning pregnant women about possible, potential, unknown dangers all around them:

The only other real option is to take the position held by Joan Wolf, author of the excellent study about contemporary risk thinking, Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood. Wolf has explored how, in the US, pregnant women are frequently told: everything is potentially risky; you have control over fetal development, but we do not know how; actions that you think are innocuous are probably harmful, but we cannot tell you which ones; things you do or do not do might be more problematic at certain times in pregnancy, but we do not know when; what you do or do not do can produce disastrous or moderately negative effects, but we cannot predict either one.

Wolf’s assessment is that the only rational response is not a call for more information of this kind; rather, it is to recognise that there is far too much of it already. While science can tell us important things, what we need to come to terms with is the inevitability of risk, the fact that people do risky things all day long (in that there are outcomes of actions over which we do not have total control), but this is just life. It is not a problem, and we do not need to be ‘informed’ or ‘empowered’ about it.

The other sort of argument made by the critics of the RCOG report was that instead of ‘raising awareness’ of the theoretical risks of everyday chemicals, more advice and information should be given to pregnant women about ‘real harm’. Hence, instead of just focusing on making it clear to the RCOG what they should do with their report, the critics have engaged in a sort of ‘my risk is bigger than your risk’ competition. In the discussion so far, the risks we apparently really understand and should be even more informed about have included all the old chestnuts: coffee, alcohol, cigarettes and stress.

Indeed, an interesting ‘my risk is bigger than your risk’ theme is developing when it comes to ‘stress’. Here, the entirely legitimate point that it is not reasonable to worry people and cause anxiety for no reason has morphed into a claim about the apparently overwhelming evidence that ‘stress’ endangers the developing fetus. In reality, as the US sociologist Betsy Armstrong has explained, the ‘science’ supporting the idea that stress in pregnancy is a problem is far more contentious than such objections assume. The wider public discourse about this issue demands robust criticism not endorsement because of its scaremongering qualities. In any case, given that a pregnant woman can no more avoid ‘stress’ in her life than a she can a pre-prepared ham sandwich, it is worth asking quite where this line of argument takes us.

June 10, 2013

Happy Tax Freedom Day

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:29

Today is the day that Canadians start earning money for themselves, having worked the year up to this point to pay for our various levels of government:

Tax Freedom Day, the day Canadian families have made enough money to pay off the total tax bill levied by all levels of government, falls on Monday, June 10 this year, according to the Fraser Institute’s annual calculations.

Tax Freedom Day arrives two days later than 2012 when it fell on June 8.

“Canadians are waiting an extra two days to celebrate Tax Freedom Day partly because governments across the country continue to increase taxes in an effort to make up for their overspending and deficits,” said Charles Lammam, Fraser Institute associate director of tax and budget policy and co-author of Canadians Celebrate Tax Freedom Day on June 10, 2013.

“What’s worse, some governments are relying on the most damaging types of tax increases including higher tax rates on personal income and investment, which will ultimately discourage economic growth.”

Among the tax increases announced so far are hikes to BC’s corporate income tax and top personal tax rate as well as its Medical Services Plan premiums; a new top income tax bracket in Quebec; increases to Manitoba’s Provincial Sales Tax and financial corporate capital tax; increases to New Brunswick’s corporate income tax and all four personal income tax rates; increased taxes on small businesses in PEI; cancellation of a corporate tax decrease in Saskatchewan; and increased Employment Insurance premiums federally.

Tax Freedom Day also comes later this year because Canada’s progressive tax system imposes a higher tax burden on families as their incomes increase.

You can use the Fraser Institute’s Personal Tax Freedom Day calculator to find your own tax freedom day here.

When recycling makes sense – and when it doesn’t

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:14

Michael Munger examines two of the most common myths about recycling:

Almost everything that’s said about recycling is wrong. At the very least, none of the conventional wisdom is completely true. Let me start with two of the most common claims, each quite false:

  1. Everything that can be recycled should be recycled. So that should be the goal of regulation: zero waste.
  2. If recycling made economic sense, the market system would take care of it. So no regulation is necessary, and in fact state action is harmful.

If either of those two claims were true, then the debate would be over. The truth is more complicated than almost anyone admits.

There are two general kinds of arguments in favor of recycling. The first is that “this stuff is too valuable to throw away!” In almost all cases, this argument is false, and when it is correct recycling will be voluntary; very little state action is necessary. The second is that recycling is cheaper than landfilling the waste. This argument may well be correct, but it is difficult to judge because officials need keep landfill prices artificially low to discourage illegal dumping and burning. Empirically, recycling is almost always substantially more expensive than disposing in the landfill.

Since we can’t use the price system, authorities resort to moralistic claims, trying to persuade people that recycling is just something that good citizens do. But if recycling is a moral imperative, and the goal is zero waste, not optimal waste, the result can be a net waste of the very resources that recycling was implemented to conserve. In what follows, I will illustrate the problems with each of the two central fallacies of mandatory and pure-market recycling, and then will turn to the problem of moral imperatives.

No surprise here – there’s also a maple-flavoured PRISM

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

In the Globe and Mail, Colin Freeze covers the Canadian data collection program that was approved by the Martin government in 2005 and “renewed” by the Harper government in 2011:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails — including those of Canadians — for patterns of suspicious activity.

Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail. The program had been placed on a lengthy hiatus, according to the documents, after a federal watchdog agency raised concerns that it could lead to warrantless surveillance of Canadians.

There is little public information about the program, which is the subject of Access to Information requests that have returned hundreds of pages of records, with many passages blacked out on grounds of national security.

It was first explicitly approved in a secret decree signed in 2005 by Bill Graham, defence minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

It is illegal for most Western espionage agencies to spy on their citizens without judicial authorization. But rising fears about foreign terrorist networks, coupled with the explosion of digital communications, have shifted the mandates of secretive electronic-eavesdropping agencies that were created by military bureaucracies to spy on Soviet states during the Cold War.

The Canadian surveillance program is operated by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), an arm of the Department of National Defence.

Daniel Ellsberg on rolling back an “executive coup” against the US constitution

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

In the Guardian, Daniel Ellsberg explains why the Snowden leak is so important:

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material — and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa — but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: “It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.”

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense — as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time — as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads — they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

The fact that congressional leaders were “briefed” on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

Edward Snowden is “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

The identity of the NSA whistleblower is revealed by the Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations — the NSA.

[. . .]

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

June 9, 2013

The new heckler’s veto – the called-in bomb threat

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

A charity event in Halifax had to be cancelled due to a phoned-in bomb threat:

A bomb threat that forced one of the Canadian Cancer Society’s biggest fundraisers to cancel on Friday night is still being felt by other groups organizing their annual walks and runs this weekend.

Halifax Regional Police said someone called 911 from a payphone at the corner of Spring Garden Road and South Park Street and made threats that alluded to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Nearby, nearly 700 people were gathered at the Oval in the Halifax Common for the Relay for Life.

Police met with the organizers and the fundraiser was called off, ruining a year’s worth of work by dozens of volunteers.

“I would say don’t ever do this again because you are hurting people in their time of need,” said Barbra Stead-Coyle, CEO of the Cancer Society.

“Last night my heart broke for the volunteers who put their whole heart and soul into making last night’s events.”

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