For those not familiar with academic processes: These boards approve or reject all research done on human subjects at US universities (including, of course, software development experiments); other countries have an equivalent counterpart, such as Canada’s Ethics Review Boards. Put simply, their mission is to protect these subjects from dangerous or careless research. They are overall a great thing –for example, as much as I loved reading Milgram’s obedience experiment, I would have hated to participate in it, and it’s good to know there is now people performing a sanity check on all human-subjects research. However, as the article shows, these boards sometimes border on the ridiculous:
Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”
Out of the blue, here are some of my favourite Toronto blogs that help understand and enjoy my adoptive city:
Spacing Wire: Part of Spacing, an independent urban-policy publication that is quite possibly the best magazine I’ve ever read, on any topic: Insightful, propositive, and a labour of love; it’s impossible to read it and not love Toronto right away. The only drawback is that there’s just one issue every six four months (thanks Matt) – Spacing Wire and the photoblog Spacing Photos fill the gap the rest of the year. By the way, the newest edition of Spacing should be on newsstands starting today.
Toronto Before: Compare archival pictures of Toronto with recent shoots from the same locations. An eye opener.
Illegal Signs: A blog that hopefully will keep on going until every illegal marketing sign is taken away from the streets of Toronto.
Torontoist: Cultural events and policy news. It’s not always on topic, but it’s still fun so it doesn’t really matter.
Daily dose of imagery: Another cool photoblog, usually about Toronto, with an eye for both the grandiose and the nitty gritty details.
This is a complex city; full of quirks and surprises to discover beyond the tiresome homogeneity of the franchises and highways prevalent in North America. It’s a bit difficult to explore these hidden angles of Toronto by oneself, so it’s great to have these blogs as tour guides.
Since I was underwater for the past couple of weeks, I barely had a chance to write about this video. It’s now been linked to by practically every blog on the planet but mine. In case you haven’t seen it, here it goes.
You may know I’m not a fan of the Web 2.0 buzzword, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love what it represents. So here it is, in less than 5 minutes, the best description I’ve seen of what it means to live with the whole world on the other side of the web:
One of the benefits of last year’s eye opener of having TimeSnapper show me a replay of my daily inefficiency was that I decided I would disable Thunderbird’s automatic email checking. Now I only get my new email when I request it, between tasks, and the difference is remarkable. Since interruptions fall down dramatically, I get in the flow much more easily and frequently, and for longer periods. Considering that I have a looming paper deadline (hence the lack of posts!), it’s an improvement that was badly needed.
Yesterday, a grad student asked me whether I could answer a survey he was doing for his research. I’ve struggled getting participants in the past, and seeing that the survey would only take a couple of minutes, I accepted. It was a survey about the urban design of a particular place at the University of Toronto, [...]
Someone very dear to me told me, a few weeks ago, that he had noticed I was becoming more and more intolerant with several positions and people —among them, climate change deniers. He felt it wasn’t fitting for a scientist, a person supposed to examine the facts objectively and to be a professional doubter, to [...]
Today was (still is, at the time of writing) the 1st Workshop on Software Research on Climate Change, down in Florida. Jon Pipitone and I planned to attend remotely, skype-ing in, but never got around to make it work satisfactorily: our connection kept getting dropped, perhaps due to bad connectivity at the conference centre. In any [...]
The company my brother works for has just released a website called This is an Advertisement: This is an Advertisement is a site where the ads are the content. It’s as simple (and counterintuitive) as that. We believe ads are useful and even entertaining — valuable information that should be available when we want and need [...]
Measuring something as simple as the size of a software organization turns out to be a tricky problem. It’s clear to see that while IBM, Microsoft, and Google are “large”, the company my friends and I started when we finished our undergrads was “small”. But as I will show, beyond these basic comparisons it’s hard [...]
More on good food: NOW magazine has just reviewed the Hot Yam!, an amazing one-day-a-week eatery at the University of Toronto that’s very close to my heart. It’s an extremely positive and well deserved review. Congratulations everyone, and if you haven’t tried it yet you must! Thursdays, noon to 2pm. [...]
Val and I are now volunteering to distribute Good Food Boxes in our neighbourhood (we’re at Charles and Balmuto St). We got our first order today, and the veggies are fantastic—I thought I’d share the contents of a large box in case you’re interested: (cat not included!) Contents: 4 corn (peaches & cream) 1 cucumber 1 pint of blue […]
Val and I recently celebrated our sixth year in Canada. We felt nostalgic, so we went to walk around our old neighbourhood, the Annex, along with my sister, who was visiting from Mexico. While there we decided to get some drinks at Future Bakery —it was a nice evening but the patio was full, so [...]
Would you agree that discussing climate change with a denialist is one of the most exhausting and frustrating debating experiences there are? Then you’ll enjoy reading Steve Easterbrook’s informative summary of a series of studies by Kahan and Braman on cultural cognition (and you might enjoy the studies themselves!). Kahan and Braman write: Indi […]
A very accessible short article by Greg Wilson in American Scientist provides a nice summary of the results of the survey he and his colleagues conducted recently. He concludes that the survey shows two things are clear: The first is that if funding agencies, vendors and computer science researchers really want to help working scientists do [...]
