A distinctly Canadian kind of fame

Posted on March 3, 2009 by David Megginson

In Canada, people who have served time for a wrongful murder conviction become famous — very famous — and stay that way for years and decades. Steven Truscott, Donald Marshall Jr., David Milgaard, and Guy Paul Morin are arguably household names, better known than many celebrities (including most medal-winning Canadian Olympic athletes, award-winning musicians, etc.)

Truscott’s initial wrongful conviction took place 40 years ago, but if anything, he’s better known now than any time before. Three men with more recentky-overturned convictions — Robert Baltovich, Bill Mullins-Johnson, and James Driskell — are also getting on-going press coverage, TV documentaries, etc.

I had never thought anything unusual about this phenomenon, until the Mullins-Johnson article was suddenly deleted from Wikipedia, with no debate — the Wikipedia editor had assumed that a wrongful conviction was so obviously unnotable that no discussion was required, but when I objected, he did restore the article and start a proper RFD debate.

When Wikipedia has articles about minor, imaginary videogame characters, it seemed unimaginable to me at first that editors would try to delete an article about a real, famous person, but so far, there seems little support for keeping the article. Thinking about it, I suddenly realized that the wrongfully-convicted aren’t famous in the U.S. Sure, I could Google around and find a few names, but in the U.S., serving 10 years for a murder you didn’t commit does not automatically make you a household name — in fact, it might not even result in a national news story.

Perhaps there’s a strong feeling of discomfort around the issue in a country that still executes so many of its citizens. Or perhaps, because the wrongly-convicted often have prior criminal records, Americans don’t feel that their convictions were such a serious injustice. Many U.S. jurisdictions (all?) have very small limits on the compensation you can receive for a wrongful conviction, while in Canada, someone who has been in jail for years could receive well over $1M — a big news story in itself.

I have a conflict of interest with the RFD for the Bill Mullins-Johnson article because I was the original author (though many others have since contributed), but if the article is going to be deleted, I’d hate it to be simply from lack of debate. So, Wikipedia users, whether you agree or disagree with me, please visit the RFD page and have your say.

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Customer Problem Checklist

Posted on February 27, 2009 by David Megginson

Whether you’re writing a business plan for your personal startup (the tech equivalent of the Great American Novel that every hack journalist plans to write), a report for your customers, or a proposal for your managers, sooner or later you’re going to have to describe a customer problem — the justification for creating a product or launching a project.

Frankly, the majority of customer problem descriptions I’ve seen and heard — including those I’ve been involved in — have been either poorly thought out or complete B.S. I know I won’t always be allowed to use this, but as a consultant and as a poor fool who still dreams of his own startup, I’ve written a checklist of six criteria that a real customer problem must meet:

  1. It uses the customer’s language, not yours — if any words or ideas need to be defined or explained, then it’s probably not really a customer problem.
  2. It describes a business need — it should not mention the proposed technical solution (such as a social network, CMS, etc.).
  3. It is recognizable — the customer is already familiar with the problem or with a very similar one, and doesn’t need to be convinced that the problem exists (though she might not be aware of its severity).
  4. It is quantifiable — even if you can’t assign a number yet, it is the kind of problem that has a cost expressed in concrete units such as money, time, subscriptions, support calls, page views, etc.
  5. It is compelling — you can demonstrate potential benefits, savings, etc. that justify the time, cost, and effort for the customer to try to solve it.
  6. It is succinct — you can describe summarize the problem meaningfully in a single, short sentence (of course, you’re always free to elaborate it somewhere else).

The passing grade on this checklist is 100%. If only one checklist item is missing, the problem is likely just wishful thinking — if your product or project succeeds, it will be despite your idea of the problem, not because of it.

Note: It’s actually easy to come up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria; what’s hard is coming up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria and have credible technical solutions.

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Only in Canada: $0.15/tweet

Posted on February 25, 2009 by David Megginson

Update: Bell quickly backed down — Tweets will be billed just like any other text messages. Interesting that a little web company was able to beat a huge telco on this one.

Facebook and other US sites have no problem sending SMS messages to my Canadian cell phone, but Twitter hasn’t had as much luck — maybe they’ve been looking for ways to avoid paying bulk SMS charges. However, they recently announced that customers of Bell Mobility (one of Canada’s big two wireless providers) can now send and receive tweets again, with “no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan).”

Not so, says Bell. According to this story, Bell Mobility is treating Twitter as a “premium service”, and will charge CAD 0.15 for every tweet sent or received, no matter what text plan you have.

That’s actually worse than the status quo. On my Canadian Rogers cell phone, I can’t receive tweets right now, but I don’t pay anything extra to send them with my current text plan.

I guess I’ll stick with Facebook status updates instead. They work fine with Canadian phones, and Rogers hasn’t (yet) decided that they’re a premium service.

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"Swimming the Atlantic"

Posted on February 13, 2009 by David Megginson

Last week, international media outlets reported that American Jennifer Figge had become (or claimed to have become) the first woman to “swim the Atlantic” — the BBC story is pretty typical.

According to the initial stories, Figge swam from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad (3,380 km direct distance) in 24 days, spending up to 8 hours/day in the water. Since this is a tech blog, I know that you’ve all already started to do the arithmetic, and you’re right. Even in the ideal case (no course deviations, 8 hours/day swimming), she would have had to maintain an average pace of 17.6 km/hr to pull that off. She did have the benefit of swimming with the North Equatorial Current at her back — it’s a weak current, but let’s allow her 0.6 km/hr for it, leaving an average required pace of 17.0 km/hr.

The men’s world record for 50m freestyle (front crawl) swimming is currently 21.8 seconds, or 8.3 km/hr. That includes a huge initial speed-up from the leap off the podium, and even then, the pace the brings the world’s top elite swimmers to absolute exhaustion in only 0.05 km. It also takes place in a calm swimming pool with a swimmer wearing a speedo, rather than against huge ocean swells with the swimmer wearing a wetsuit. Even in the pool, no one could keep up that pace for minutes, much less hours or days.

In fact, it was soon confirmed that Figge swam only about 400 kilometers over those 24 days: an impressive distance for an amateur athlete at any age, much less in her 50s, but not the distance across the Atlantic Ocean.

So I guess that “swimming the Atlantic” does not mean the same as “swimming across the Atlantic.” I’m curious about what it does mean, because there are two other people who became famous for “swimming the Atlantic”:

  • Guy Delage claimed to have swum the Atlantic with the assistance of a kickboard, covering 2,100 nautical miles (3,889 kilometers) in 51 days. Even assuming 8 hours/day, that works out to an average pace of 9.5 km/hr.
  • Benoît Lecomte claimed to have swum the Atlantic unassisted, covering 3,716 miles (5,980 km) in 72 days, swimming 6–8 hours/day. Even assuming 8 hours every day, that works out to an average pace of 10.4 km/hr.

By contrast, in swimming across Lake Ontario in 1959, Marilyn Bell took 21 hours to cover 52 kilometers direct distance, for an average pace of 2.5 km/hr. People have called even that into question, since with currents and primitive navigation equipment in the support boat, she may have actually had to cover a much greater distance, but at least it doesn’t strain credibility.

(The original title of this posting was “Swimming the Atlantic” vs. grade-four arithmetic, but that seemed to be tempting fate, since I’ve likely made at least one arithmetic error in this posting.)

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Mapping people, money, and land through airports

Posted on January 30, 2009 by David Megginson

OurAirports lets members tag airports to create different kinds of maps. I’ve created two maps that show very vividly where the intersections of people, money, and land occur in the world.

Welcome to the club …

The first tag, top150, shows the world’s 150 busiest airports by passenger traffic (as of 2007). Central Africa has lots of people, but not much money, so it’s empty. Australia and Canada have high per-capita incomes but a low population density, so they also appear mostly empty in the map, with only a handful of top-150 airports each. The U.S. has a lot of land but also a lot of money and a lot of people, so it’s very full. India and the Persian Gulf countries are starting to fill up, as incomes rise and more people travel.

… but not this club

The second tag, top30, shows a much more exclusive club, the world’s 30 busiest airports by passenger traffic. These are the absolute busiest hubs, and it takes a rich and populous city or country to support one. Not by accident, fully half of these airports (15) are in the United States, and 8 more are in Western Europe, leaving only 7 for the rest of the world to share.

In this club, the 1.3 billion citizens of China are represented by only two airports (including Hong Kong), and the 1.2 billion citizens of India are not represented at all. Canada and Australia also don’t make the cut (too few people).

Of course, there are other considerations: aside from its money, land, and people, the heavy air passenger traffic in the U.S. may also reflect its horrendous rail system.

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Peak wood?

Posted on January 21, 2009 by David Megginson

No, this isn’t a porn title: here’s a claim that Roman civilization collapsed partly because Europe passed “peak wood”.

Let’s leave aside the question of what Roman civilization means, and whether it collapsed in 44 BC, 391 AD, 395, 476, 1453, or some other date. If I remember correctly, much Western European farmland reverted to forest after the Black Death of the 14th century, where there was a huge decline in available farm labour — there’s actually more forest in many parts of Europe now than there was before the Bubonic plague.

And that’s the problem with tossing around silly phrases like “peak wood” — you don’t have to do anything to reforest — just stop working to keep the forest away. If all humans left North America for 20 years and then returned, we’d find that our farmers’ fields, sports stadiums, backyards, parking lots, and even city streets were already well on their way back to being forests. Fossil fuels, unfortunately, don’t work that way (at least not in a human time frame).

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The "Nanny State" argument

Posted on January 21, 2009 by David Megginson

Mary Poppins

In my home province, Ontario, it’s now illegal to smoke in a car with a child in it [story]. Another sign of a growing nanny state?

No. A nanny state passes laws to protect people from themselves — “wear a helmet”, “don’t eat trans-fats”, “don’t smoke pot”.

A government passes laws to protect its citizens from each-other — “don’t steal”, “don’t drive drunk”, “don’t attack people with a hockey stick”, or even “don’t do noisy construction work at 3:00 am in a residential area”.

If you’re a hockey player, I support your right to swing your stick, but that right does not extend all the way to my face. If you’re a smoker, I support your right to smoke (tobacco or otherwise), but that right does not extend all the way to my lungs, or to your child’s. There’s nothing nannyish about that.

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A glimpse at future traffic nightmares, and how we can cope

Posted on January 10, 2009 by David Megginson

As North American cities get bigger, and more people drive cars, how are we going to cope with the traffic? Will it be permanent gridlock? It’s gone out of style to bulldoze neighbourhoods to build new freeways, but even if we did that and built more expressways into the city, where would all the cars park when they got here?

We’ve had a glimpse of what that future dystopia might look like here in Ottawa, as our public transit strike has just finished its first month. We’ve had only about 20% more cars on the road, but combined with very cold weather and heavy snow (including blizzards), things have gotten bad. One-way commutes that used to take 45 minutes now sometimes take two and a half hours, and the downtown core completely gridlocks: even as new drivers arrive, the ones came 30 minutes ago are still circling trying to find somewhere to park.

How can any big city survive a traffic nightmare like this? Here are some of the workarounds people have come up with:

  • Missing work altogether. I know one doctor who had a four-hour shift scheduled at her suburban hospital before Christmas on the morning of a very heavy snowfall. She called and found out that even if she could make it in, there was an hour-and-a-half line-up to get into the parking lot (even for doctors), so she finally just gave up.

  • Time-shifting. Not every job actually requires you to be in from 9-5. People are heading to work a couple of hours early or late and missing the worst of the gridlock. By 7:00 pm, traffic is almost back to normal again, at least in the city core.

  • Telecommuting. People are working from home more often than usual, or just as often, working from the nearest coffee shop. They look at the weather forecast, and if it’s bad and their jobs permit, they just stay home.

  • Human propulsion. People who live within easy walking distance (5 km/3 miles) of work or school are just walking — its faster, and burns off some of the Starbucks calories. Walking’s not pleasant on days when the windchill drops to -25 degC or worse, but it beats gridlock and fighting for a scarce parking spot. Cycling’s not an option in this weather except for the very brave, but people are also cross-country skiing or skating to work when they can.

  • Ride sharing. While it doesn’t help you get to work any faster individually (though it helps in the aggregate), ride sharing is very useful if you have no car, or if it’s difficult to find parking places where you’re heading. Lots of people are car-pooling with co-workers, using ride-sharing web sites, or even just standing by the side of the road holding signs saying where they want to go.

  • Private shuttles. The universities set up private shuttles to help at least some students get in for the Christmas exams, and fortunately, the transit union backed down from its threat to block them with picket lines. Some high schools are also offering limited private bus service (Ottawa urban high school and middle school students use public transit, not yellow school buses).

  • Fewer parking restrictions. Parking spots in the city core that normally have a 1-, 2-, or 3-hour time limit are now unrestricted, so that commuters can use them (the normal time limit is meant to guarantee that they’re left free for shoppers, etc., so businesses might not be thrilled). People have misinterpreted that and parked in no-parking/no-stopping zones or even in front of hydrants, and have been furious when they’ve been ticketed.

  • Helping the vulnerable. Our ParaTranspo service is still operating, and there’s talk about extending it to seniors (so that they’re not shut in). The city is also talking about taxi vouchers for low-income earners whose jobs are at risk.

So over all, a city can cope, even with a crisis like this. Most people I’ve talked to don’t like the strike, but also admit that we’re getting used to living without public transit.

I think we’re missing some real opportunities, though. For example, why not designate one or two lanes on the major highways as carpool-only lanes (minimum 3 occupants)? That way, there would be a significant speed advantage to ride sharing, rather than just a general feeling of virtue. We could do the same with the bus lanes on downtown streets, and let carpoolers just whiz by the gridlock. That’s the kind of thing that we might want to keep even after the strike’s finished.

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Black Monday for tech workers (??)

Posted on January 5, 2009 by David Megginson

I’m hearing rumours of small-scale layoffs from a few different places around Ottawa, mostly small-to-medium-sized companies.

Just a single layoff affects dozens of people:

  • the person who’s let go
  • the person’s family
  • the managers who have to do the firing
  • the person’s work friends, who’ll miss the lunchtime chats and drinks after work
  • the person’s coworkers, who’ll have to pick up the extra load
  • people from other organizations or members of the public who had dealings with the person
  • the restaurant owner across the street, who always had a special curry set aside for his favorite customer
  • (and so on)

When the slowdown became inescapable in November, many companies may have decided to postpone layoffs until after the Christmas holidays, out of kindness. The holidays are over now, and today (January 5) is the first day everyone will be back at work, so there could be a lot of postponed pain hitting all at once.

Are these just a few isolated incidents, or will today be the day that the economic slowdown starts to seem real to people in the tech industry?

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Why stimulus attempts fail

Posted on December 18, 2008 by David Megginson

When a government spends money, a few things happen:

  1. it competes with the private sector for money, driving up inflation (or interest rates)
  2. it competes with the private sector for products and services, driving up costs
  3. it competes with the private sector for land, driving up property prices
  4. it competes with the private sector for workers, driving up salaries

During a boom, these are all bad things — when inflation, costs, and salaries are already too high, government spending just pumps more air into the bubble, leading to an even bigger bust later on (as we’re seeing this time around).

During a bust, it’s a different story. With the spectre of deflation and negative interest rates, more competition for money is a good thing. With companies laying off workers and struggling to stay afloat, more competition for products and services is a good thing. With a collapsing property market, more competition for land is a good thing. And with a huge pool of un- or under-employed workers, more competition for labour is a good thing.

So with so much potential good, why are stimulus packages usually a bad thing?

It’s all in the timing

Spending enough money to actually stimulate the economy out of a recession takes a lot of time. Sure, governments can spend some fixing existing roads and bridges, repairing sewers, etc., but that’s chickenfeed. To spend serious money and put people back to work, they need to do big stuff like new high-speed rail lines or highways, convention centres, etc.

Now, stop and think for a second.

Let’s say that you have access to $20B, right now, to build a high-speed rail line down the U.S. West Coast from Seattle to San Diego. When can you spend it?

First, you need to have public hearings.

Then you need to plan the line.

Then you need to negotiate with all the governments along the way.

Then you need an environmental assessment.

Then you need to put the work out for tender.

Then you need to expropriate some land, and deal with the court challenges from people losing their homes, parks, etc.

Then, 10-20 years later, you can start construction.

Granted, that’s an extreme case, but even something as simple as a new convention centre takes several years from first planning to the start of construction, with design, approval, tender, environmental assessment, etc.

Inflating the next bubble

And there’s the problem. Maybe we’ll still be in a bust in several years, but maybe .. just maybe .. we’ll be in the middle of a world-wide boom.

Then all the money that governments are committing now will go not to pull countries out of the current recession, but to inflate another bubble that could make the next recession even worse.

Are there any options? We could try to plan stimulus packages during the boom, not during the bust, so that they’re ready to go when we actually need them. The problem is, how do you predict a bust 5-10 years in advance? Are contractors and workers willing to wait an uncertain number of years to start work until the next recession is declared?

That is why stimulus attempts mostly fail.

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