It’s a ridicu­lous time for spec­u­la­tion, given that the one poll that really matters is actively underway, but I’m going to spec­u­late anyway. I’ve got four ifs and a hopeful then.

• If Harper doesn’t get a majority.
• If the NDP comes in number two.
• If the NDP and the Liberals have more seats together than the Conservatives, without the help of the Bloc.
• If the NDP cal­cu­late that the public opinion cost of spear­heading a coali­tion wouldn’t be too high.
• Then we could have an NDP-​​led centre-​​left coali­tion within weeks.

I’d assign about 2/​3rds like­li­hood to the #1 if. The best two polling aggre­ga­tion and mod­el­ling sites are both pro­jecting 143 seats for the Cons, 12 short of a clear majority. Polling and mod­el­ling some­times gets it wrong, but not usually very wrong right before an election. Especially if multiple models are coa­lescing on the same projection.

#2 if is probably 2/​3rds likely as well. Even the more cautious three​hun​dredan​deight​.com is pro­jecting the NDPs in a strong second place. Given that the numbers were getting higher right up until the last poll left the field, that could mean that the final results could look even better.

#3 is hard to tell, but let’s say ¹⁄₂ chance. tooclos​e​to​call​.com says yes, three​hun​dredan​deight​.com says no.

#4 is probably 3/​4s likely. The Liberals made a choice to under­write Harper’s very effec­tive framing of coali­tions as back-​​room deals to elect second place leaders. They probably had to. But the NDP never bought that message, and they’re better placed to lead the charge on re-​​framing. And if they do form a rel­a­tively stable two-​​party sans-​​Bloc coali­tion, it would likely give them a full four years to prove to the sus­pi­cious Anglo masses that coali­tions are a boring, prac­tical arrangement.

I’m not sure how to boil those prob­a­bil­i­ties into a single math­e­mat­ical like­li­hood, because they’re all cor­re­lated with each other. But gen­er­ally I’d say we’ve got a one out of two chance of a won­derful outcome here.

The alter­na­tive could be terrible. Who says Canadian politics are boring? OK, nobody lately.

Also worth noting: the first major act of a re-​​elected Conservative party is pre­sum­ably to re-​​introduce the same budget that par­tially trig­gered the last dis­so­lu­tion. If a coali­tion is to be formed, that will be an obvious moment for it. If it happens, it could happen in a matter of weeks. Another wildcard: even if a coali­tion meant a second-​​place Liberal party very pub­li­cally going back on their word and allying them­selves with the nasty Bloc, they might still go for it. I’m not sure it would be stable or play well in the inevitable next election, but it would be hard to resist.

Oh boy.

I’m pleased to report that a photo of mine is going to be used on the cover of this new book:

That’s Jane schlep­ping in across the scree slope at the top of a truly nasty block on the Bluebird road outside of Creston. Looks pretty good to me. And I like the font.

The book is by Charlotte Gill and pre­sum­ably has its roots in this award-​​winning short story. It should be out in a few months. I gather there’s a lot of back-​​and-​​forth in book pub­lishing, all of which takes time.

Swing33​.ca links to the donation pages of 33 can­di­dates that could be key to the outcome of the upcoming election. The idea came from Mitch Anderson, who rents a desk beside the desk I rent, and who has an op-​​ed in the Tyee today explaining. I helped build it.

We’re not fans of the Harper admin­is­tra­tion, and we’d like to do some­thing to boost the prospects of the leftist (and centrist) Canadian parties. There’s 308 ridings in Canada, but not all of them are likely to switch sides in 2011. Of those that are in play, not all are being seri­ously con­tested by a Conservative can­di­date. We had a look at the results of the last election and spread­sheeted out the ones where Conservatives came close to winning or close to losing. There are 33 ridings where there was less than a 5% dif­fer­ence between the Conservative and the top non-​​Conservative can­di­date. That’s our list. If you’re going to donate to a polit­ical campaign (and Mitch argues there’s good reason to), then you might want want to target it at cam­paigns that are likely to decide the number of Conservative seats in the next par­lia­ment. That goals feels impor­tant right now.

We did simple-​​ish math to pick out those ridings, and it’s not a perfect system. We’re using recent history as a guide and history doesn’t sit still. We’ve already spotted a couple of dis­tricts where local con­di­tions have changed since 2008 such that the best con­tender probably isn’t the one Excel picked. Saanich — Gulf Islands is the most obvious to me. (Donate to the Greens there, not the Liberals like the site says.) A com­menter at the Tyee has already called out Esquimalt — Juan de Fuca as another flub.

We’re con­sid­ering aggre­gating that kind of local­ized knowl­edge, and/​or bringing in con­tem­po­rary polling data and pro­viding an alter­na­tive curated list. Time is the lim­i­ta­tion. In the meantime we didn’t want to make it any harder to under­stand what the site was about by adding excep­tions to our algo­rithmic approach.

In sum: if you or someone you know can be con­vinced to pony up some cash to help facil­i­tate a good outcome in this year’s election, Swing33 could provide some rea­son­able guidance for giving that donation the most impact. The Conservatives are far better fundraisers than any of their com­pe­ti­tion, so give it some thought. Links to the donation pages of 33 likely can­di­dates are just two clicks away.

“Trawling through Vincent’s col­lec­tion we pulled out 10 con­tem­po­rary and classic grooves straight from the streets of Kinshasa. Many of these records are released as limited press­ings and finding them can be an arduous task. Our best advice is to try the spe­cialist African music outlet Stern’s.“

Congo, where rumba meets r’n’b — Josh Surtees, The Guardian

The article goes on to describe the ten tracks, each with a Youtube link dis­creetly included for those who don’t have time to scour Stern’s.

I would never have pre­dicted that a video site would become some­thing like a rough-​​and-​​ready uni­versal library of audio.

Here’s Wendo Kolosoy, described in the article as the grand­fa­ther of Congolese rhumba, per­forming Marie Louise:

When I was DJ-​​ing at WCBN there was some dis­agree­ment over the probity of playing Youtube clips over the airwaves. The Program Director felt, rea­son­ably enough, that DJs should strive for highest audio quality and to showcase the extra­or­di­nary, vinyl-​​anchored WCBN music library. I’m not sure exactly how that dis­cus­sion resolved itself, but I don’t doubt that people will still fire up Youtube when they catch a tricky request or just can’t find a special track in the stacks. Because they can.

I’m working on a fun project for the BC Forest Practices Board. We’re taking great whack­loads of province-​​wide spatial data and trans­mo­gri­fying it into handy reports on the physical status of forests in dif­ferent admin­is­tra­tive and eco­log­ical zones. And I’m pleased to report that the project is begin­ning to produce some GIS art.

bio­geo­cli­mactic zones around Port Alberni

GIS art, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, are the serendip­i­tous bits of aes­thetic map flotsam that tend to pop up as inter­me­diary products in geo­graphic analysis chains. They’re the recom­bi­nant product of the natural attrac­tive­ness of land­forms, the semi-​​random auto­mated assign­ment of colours to land­cover classes, and the quasi-​​organic dis­tor­tions intro­duced by algo­rithm. The above is a rel­a­tively unprocessed version, see for com­par­ison one of my old favourites:

local­ized explana­tory power of soil water for shape­ness
of juniper, Strawberry Crater, Waputki AZ

OK, so maybe it’s not great art. But when GIS art does show up, it’s often a nicely timed dis­trac­tion from the more abstract “plea­sures” of ana­lyt­ical troubleshooting.

As I write this the news about the Japanese nuclear plant emer­gen­cies seems to be getting cau­tiously worse. Morning reports described a single reactor that was recieving insuf­fi­cient cooling due to power loss. Now the news says there’s a second reactor with similar probems, and possibly a third with a fire on site. It’s a race now. The main power is cut to the reactor cores, the sec­ondary diesel gen­er­a­tors have failed somehow, and the tertiary battery-​​powered systems are appar­ently unable to pump enough cooling fresh water through the hot rods to keep them from turning the water that is there into radioac­tive, pres­sur­ized steam. If the dimin­ished flow of water is less than the amount being boiled off the rods will even­tu­ally be exposed to the air, at which point they will melt. A ‘nuclear melt down’.

That probably won’t happen. Batteries are being deliv­ered to the site to maintain the lessened flow. (A task cur­rently being handled by US Air Force jets. How does a military jet deliver a battery to a power plant I wonder?). Eventually the sec­ondary or primary power will come on and complete cooling will happen. Right?

Already one of the reactors has had to have some amount of steam vented into the open air, and res­i­dents within 6 kilo­me­ters are being advised to stay indoors. I have no idea what the impacts to res­i­dents in the region might be, either in the best or the worst case scenarios.

But the impacts to the climate are nec­es­sarily bad, even in the best case. In the worst case they might be terrible.

Increased build-​​out of nuclear power is likely a nec­es­sary but not suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for pre­venting world­wide climatic cat­a­strophe. Wind, solar, algae and geot­hermal are of course superior energy gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies, but they are rel­a­tively immature prac­tices unlikey to be able to deliver the several ter­awatts of power needed to supplant fossil fuels anytime in the near or even midterm future. Absent a con­ser­va­tion rev­o­lu­tion, the prac­tical alter­na­tive is that coal and petro­leum plants that should have been moth­balled twenty years ago will continue to empty their res­pi­ra­tory clogging, climate desta­bi­lizing waste into the air at a vast daily rate for decades to come. Nuclear power plants are at least tech­ni­cally able to be deployed at large scale within a few quick years. Siting a nuclear plant takes much longer than that in practice, but prin­ci­pally because res­i­dents are deeply sus­pi­cious of having their ugly threat­ening bulks lurking on the skyline. In the last few years there seems to have been a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the affec­tions of green thinkers, and that shift seemed plau­sibly destined to filter down through the larger populace into actual power reactors getting actually built and plugged into the grid.

That per­cep­tual shift has limits (as we’re presently wit­nessing with the resis­tance to the shipping of surplus nuclear parts through the St. Lawrence). It doesn’t matter these nuclear instal­la­tions just absorbed the largest Japanese earth­quake in recorded history. It doesn’t matter that they were built by GE in 1971 using rods-​​in-​​a-​​pool tech­nology that is only slightly related to the rel­a­tively self-​​correcting closed-​​container sytems that could be erected tomorrow. People are going to look at what happens now and in the next few hours, and they are quite rea­son­ably going to ask: do I want to receive a 3 kilo­meter evac­u­a­tion warning of my own?

The primary safety systems failed. The sec­ondary systems failed (I think). The tertiary systems turn out to be insuf­fi­cient. All of which is hap­pening in a country with a disaster readi­ness culture, no lack of fore­warning about the pos­si­bility of earth­quakes, and engi­neering stan­dards as high as anywhere in the world. By late tonight we might just find out if popular opinion is going to turn against what is possibly only bridge energy source we have avail­able to keep our climate pre­dictable and stable.

Technical updates are avail­able at the Union of Concerned Scientists website. I will probably edit this post tomorrow to be less emabar­ras­ingly panicky.

(update 14.3.11: I didn’t. I’m still panicky.)

It’s been a long time since I posted new photos. I’m breaking that spell with a few snaps from around Vancouver town. So far mostly from East Van. Some more to come in fol­lowing weeks.

The fal­li­bil­i­ties of science as an insti­tu­tion have fre­quently been on display lately. I’m hoping to find some time to write about that. But today I want to make note of some­thing else: evidence of science working out well. Specifically, the freshly released extra-​​sensory per­cep­tion study and the sci­en­tific response to it.

I’m not par­tic­u­larly excited about the media response to the paper. The media’s take is still unfolding and, although I haven’t seen any really egre­gious coverage yet, based on past expe­ri­ence we can gen­er­ally antic­i­pate the usual non­com­mittal half-​​phrases that emerge from the clumsy coupling of science-​​agnostic jour­nal­ists and journalism-​​indifferent scientists.

But I am kind of excited about the way that science — meaning science as an insti­tu­tional whole — has dealt with the research. I’m excited for a few reasons.

First of all, somebody decided to do a rea­son­ably rigorous study on an inter­esting, hugely improb­able phe­nom­enon. It’s colos­sally unlikely that ESP exists in the world, but there is enough general interest in it that somebody might as well take a few weeks to run some actual tests. Not of course iron-​​clad con­clu­sive tests (such things rarely exist outside of physics and maybe chem­istry), but some exper­i­ments that are well-​​formed enough to be at least cau­tiously sug­ges­tive of the outlines of truth within some limited contexts. You know, sci­en­tific research.

Highly improb­able phe­nom­enon rarely turn out to be true. Single exper­i­ments are almost never likely to prove whether or not they’re true, either way. But true paradigm shifts in our under­standing of major phe­nomena do occur often enough that it seems worth­while to occa­sion­ally run some off-​​the-​​wall research, as long as the research is usefully com­pe­tent, and rea­son­ably cheap. Individual exper­i­ments may suggest some sur­prises, and those sur­prises are likely to even­tu­ally get explained as unim­por­tant excep­tions. They may alter­na­tively or also induce some usefully novel thinking that breaks up com­fort­able patterns of obser­va­tion. So colour me skep­tical and maybe bemused, but I can’t work up any actual anger that somebody would do a study on ESP.

Second, the paper was sub­mitted for peer-​​review. Peer review has flaws, lord lord. But it’s not such a bad pro­ce­dure all-​​in. Sort of like a pre-​​trial: is the evidence here good enough to keep the accused in lock-​​up and use up the court’s time with a real trial, or should the whole she-​​bang be tossed off the docket so we can get on to the real deal? Or rather, is the research described plau­sible enough to merit the symbolic weight of the journal’s logo in the top-​​left corner? Or is it dubious enough that we shouldn’t subject real working researchers to the onus of having to skim past the title and maybe the abstract the next time they’re scanning the results of their daily keyword search alerts?

The real world uses Digg or Reddit or Facebook or whatever to do their focus-​​filtering. Science uses the peer-​​reviewed journal method, and it works at least OK (it also uses Digg or Reddit or arxiv or whatever). Sure prestige, apathy, vengeance, intel­lec­tual provin­cialism and igno­rance all have a place in the peer review process, but mostly you get forth­right and well con­sid­ered opinions from people who have a reason to know.

In this case the panel of four peer reviewers were suf­fi­ciently con­vinced of the plau­si­bility of the research to pass it along as worth reading by other people. So it’s probably inter­esting research. So it’s good we get to hear about it.

Thirdly, smart people read the paper and are trying to figure out how the results could be the way they are. Are there exper­i­mental design flaws? Statistical flaws? Could it be that the student-​​subjects were actually influ­enced by future events? (Let’s check for sta­tis­tical flaws again.) Isn’t science amazing — if you do your work well enough, scads of brainiacs will add value by con­tex­tu­al­izing and cri­tiquing all the bits. For free! At least, free to you (except for when you pay your taxes). Sometimes that process is col­le­gial, some­times it gets personal and even ugly. I suspect we’re going to see both in this case. But we’re def­i­nitely going to see a lot of clever cats blasting away with both lobes. Fun.

I’m a little saddened by and a little sym­pa­thetic to the folks who are outraged that this topic is getting treated seri­ously at all. And yes, I’m sure that the foil-​​beany woo woo brigade will be barking about a paper proving ESP in a major journal for internet-​​years to come. There’s also an argument to be made that, given the utter implau­si­bility of extra-​​sensory per­cep­tion, diverting the atten­tion of working researchers and the public towards it for any amount of time is a waste of that time. But whatever. The guy did (appar­ently) real research. It may or may not have exper­i­mental flaws, but if he’s main­tained the intel­lec­tual respect of his intel­lec­tual peer group for this long it’s unlikely that he actively gamed his own system, or delib­er­ately fiddled his numbers after­wards. Occasionally a working researcher with some one-​​off weirdo reason for kinking their own integrity will slip one past the peer review process (e.g. 1, 2, 3). The process mostly works on a pre­sump­tion of good faith, and is sus­cep­tible on those grounds. But those are very rare events. If the media nar­ra­tive is to be believed, real researchers really respect Dr. Bem’s con­sid­er­able research record, so I’m guessing this is good-​​faith exper­i­men­ta­tion. In which case: hey, he deserves to present it to the com­mu­nity. Let’s have at it.

Fourth, the exper­i­ments are going to be repli­cated. One place I’m not so proud of science is that, as far as I can tell, this doesn’t really happen. Every high­school student is told that repli­ca­tion is very impor­tant to the sci­en­tific method. I suspect it almost never happens in practice. Because it’s boring.

What does commonly happen is that people adapt your pub­lished exper­i­mental premises in somewhat dif­ferent cir­cum­stance, and those variants both produce fresh knowl­edge and sort-​​of stand in for repli­ca­tion. Oh, you think you showed that turtle gender is influ­enced by Great Lakes water chem­istry? What about if I try it in frogs in Lake Baikal? This time I think we’re going to get to see straight-​​up repli­ca­tion. Should be inter­esting. And it will make all those high­school text­books true for a moment.

Fifth and finally, even if the results of the study are even­tu­ally deemed to not be reflec­tive of the whole truth, they are in this case guar­an­teed to be at least inter­est­ingly wrong. Which is possibly the best kind of research result. Most of the time, inter­est­ingly wrong studies will throw some little cul-​​de-​​sac of current research con­sensus into relief, and spark some ques­tions that are inter­esting to people in one side of one building on campus. This time the ques­tions emerging seem to be more grand, like: what if the common sta­tis­tical frame­work used by the dis­ci­pline of psy­chology is a) not equiv­a­lent to that used in other dis­ci­plines and b) not entirely suitable to assessing claims of extra­or­di­nary unique­ness (whatever that means)? Wouldn’t that be fun to know! So thanks Dr. Bem for helping us to find out. Even if ESP isn’t true.

Indeed, I would bet my kidneys against there being any actual ESP out there. I mean come on! It just sits way too far outside of the network of forces and facts that I have per­son­ally per­ceived or come to trust in the world. But I’m rather pleased about the reac­tions so far of the insti­tu­tion of science, an insti­tu­tion I’m rather fond of. That reaction could be going much worse — science doesn’t always deal well with insti­tu­tional problems that come at it from oblique angles. So far, so good.

While writing the pre­ceding post I dis­cov­ered that I didn’t know what the adjec­tive for having integrity was. Integral? No.

So I went looking and dis­cov­ered that

1. there is no adjec­tive for integrity
2. there is a project to make one.

The proposed word is inte­grious.

Seen from a distance, some polit­ical periods and per­son­al­i­ties appear hero­ically altru­istic. Seen up close, they probably all seem petty and egoistic.

“Presidential campaign button with por­traits of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin” — Library of Congress

This slightly dorky campaign button is one I wouldn’t mind affixing to my lapel. I just need to a find a con­tem­po­rary one as likely to endure.