Hexadecimal Monkey

Watching the Canadian Federal Election results today for my riding, Vancouver South, has been a so-called nail-biter right to the bitter end.  Ujjal Dosanjh, as of my writing this, is leading by just over 2% of the vote and has been declared the winner by all networks but Global. The Liberals have lost a number of seats, and the near loss of this seat was a shock since it had been considered a sure thing for Dosanjh by both the Liberals and most analysts. While it might indeed have been a shock to Dosanjh, the Liberal party and the analysts, it was the presentation of the unfolding story of the ballot count that was a shock to me.  The overall presentation of the process of determining the victors in each race lead to feelings of disenchantment and dismay with this election and the media presentation of the election, as well as discomfort with the underlying processes that we use to determine leadership and ultimately make decisions for Canada.

The quality of televised reporting seems to have reached a new low in journalistic professionalism. Global BC in particular seemed to be disorganized and sometimes their anchors seemed just bewildered. Based on some of the comments, I’m guessing that they had a series of data-systems failures and much of the confusion resulted from inconsistent information appearing simultaneously (but this is purely conjecture on my part).  However, there was a marked disability of the reporters and anchors to recover from issues and keep the flow of the presentation itself flowing.  Perhaps that’s a good thing in that it does point to the fallibility and constructed nature of the news as presented; in the era of the Old CBC style, and the buttoned-down and heavily scripted presentation, I suppose the average viewer may have been less aware of the media’s involvement in the production and interpretation of the message.

I don’t want to overly criticize the performance of the Global BC team: they are likely dealing with a huge influx of incoming messages and data that is a scaled up version of the information that I was monitoring on Twitter ( #canadavotes ), television (Global, CBC and CTV…), Facebook groups, email and IM from friends and colleagues, etc.  Perhaps the limits of television news’ linear presentation has met it’s match in the Web 2.0 period (sorry, had to use the term) and the stress that the medium faced in trying to filter and funnel so many live sources was what was actually evident in the presentation.   

Another thing that struck me in this election coverage was the insistence of the news media to present the counting of the ballots to be an active race between candidates.  There was rampant use of variations of the phrase “Candidate X in riding Y really has their work cut out for them tonight if they are to defeat the incumbent, Z.”  By the point that the results are being tallied, the work of the candidates and their campaign teams are done of course, the only remaining task being to count the votes. I’m wondering if this form of presentation, though obviously useful from the perspective of the news outlets, actually works to reduce participation in future elections. The actual act of voting seems quite separate from the race that appears to happen during the count; in my mind, even though I know that the presentation of the race is merely a method to make a rather dull process of counting ‘news worthy,’ I couldn’t help but feel that my action much earlier in the day was unrelated to the battle currently underway. In some way, the old vote counting processes and reporting made my action feel more significant and more connected to the process at large. I wonder if I’m alone in that thought?  If I’m not alone, will the effect of this sense of disconnectedness encourage people to increasingly become spectators rather than participants?

Further, I found a similar sense of disconnect when the outcomes of the election were largely called before we even had any results back from any BC polls. Although BC’s voters did make a difference for the balance of party power with Liberals and NDP having a fairly significant impact in many ridings, by the time the overall election results were ‘announced’, it really does leave the feeling that the BC vote doesn’t matter. If we made no other change to how votes were actually counted, I’d like Elections Canada to hold off on announcing election results until a significant number of polls from across the country had been counted.  I don’t think such a change would actually make any difference in the outcome of an individual election, but I think it might help in increasing the sense of engagement in the process for voters to the west of Ontario, and hopefully increase participation overall. 

All that said, there are so many other problems in the current electoral process that I really feel we need some significant restructuring.  I value my right to vote and I exercise that right. We have a country which supports several unique situations including a popular separatist party holding seats in the Federal government yet with relatively little violent activity or bloodshed, at least in recent years.  However, my one real opportunity to influence the process is to state my preference for a candidate to act as my representative in government. Once my vote is made, I have little voice for the next several years until the next election.  

We are indeed fortunate to live in a country where, for the most part, political activism and action is at least tolerated to a level which much of the world considers to be rather high: I won’t be shot for voting for the Marxist-Leninist candidate if I choose to do so; however, in reality once the election is over my voice essentially has no direct process for influencing choices made by government. Significant political activism often places one in the margins of society from the perspective of the media (see, for example, coverage of the WTO riots in Vancouver). On relatively pedestrian issues, I can write to the newspapers and my local MP, but rarely is there either a guarantee of an audience nor a general feeling that such communication will really make it past the various gatekeepers.  To be fair, some MPs are quite active and do attempt to communicate with their constituents, but they are the exceptions for the large part, providing these opportunities on their own accord, there is no mechanism that guarantees that the voices of all Canadians will be heard.

Realistically, it’s difficult to get a group of people more than one person to agree on solutions to relatively trivial issues, so obviously it would not be possible for every Canadian to participate in a process that would produce a reasonable negotiated agreement on every national issue.  We do know, however, that even at the level of the elections of entire parties the full spectrum of Canadian viewpoints is not represented.  In this election, I understand that the Green Party received 7% of the popular vote, but no seats.  The Bloc Québecois, on the other hand, currently shows 50 seats gained with only 10% of the popular vote.  Can this be representative of the will of the Canadian people?

With so many issues leading to a sense of disconnection between the voter and the results of the contest(s), I’m afraid that the spectator to participant ratio of Canadian voters will only increase in the future.  Significant election reform and a re-analysis of how the results are conveyed are needed soon to prevent upcoming generations from giving up on the process altogether.  

I fear the day when, like so many Strata AGMs, Canada would have to stop an election because we couldn’t meet quorum  ;-)

Funny thing happened on the way to objective reality: nobody found any dark matter.  

Sitting in CMNS800 today, a graduate survey course on Communication, the conversation centred around ideology and related concepts.  What was very interesting to me was how some theorists spoke of “ideology” as a system of beliefs, even illusions and, to overly simplify things, contrasted those ways of thinking against “science.”  Science seems to be somehow removed from being an ideology even though it presents itself as a way of interpreting and presenting the world. 

During class, I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation that was centering on the Frankfurt School’s inability to provide proposed solutions to the apparently depressing view of cultural hegemony as presented by Adorno and Horkheimer in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; however, I really wanted to take a walk down the rabbit hole that was taunting me every time Science was held up as an alternative or solution to ideology.  

The argument that Science (yes, I’m intentionally capitalizing here), because it values observation, repeatability and objectivity, is not ideological is troublesome.  In fairness, this problem of Science actually being ‘ideological’ was alluded to by a side comment, but ultimately that reference buried the issue rather than elucidating it.  

What I realized is that we have an excellent example happening essentially right now that shows the difficulty in assuming that Science is identical with Objective Reality: The Large Hadron Collider project. 

So much of our science and technology is grounded on our understanding of the workings of molecules, the structure and “function” of the atomic, and then sub-atomic units off matter.  By the majority of people, the ability to demonstrate the existence of subatomic particles is the ultimate result of a procedural pursuit of objective reality through experimentation and observation. There is some truth in that belief: it is possible for scientists to accurately model systems and demonstrate that their models reflect the motions and existence of sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules and so on up the chain to the observable constituents of the world that we perceive.  This is Science to the common person, and in some discussions it would seem that people believe this to represent a well understood Objective Reality because the conclusions that we believe as Truth all followed from a structured approach of experimentation and observation. 

So what does this have to do with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?  The LHC is a massive undertaking that is a scientific attempt at validating our beliefs in the answers provided to us by science.  There are a few problems where our current models simply do not have answers.  We don’t know how gravity works.  We aren’t able to explain how a particle actually gets mass.  There is this nagging problem where the current calculations and formulas actually don’t work that well unless we have some explanation of where a bunch of matter went missing from the universe.  The LHC is going to try to find the answers to some of these questions.  The question in my mind is: “how?”.  And, it is this question is where I think the evidence that Science is bound up as ideology is made clear.  

The LHC is centered around a giant detector that has been built to verify a number of theories that we have about particles that we have yet to be able to observe.  If the particles are found and those particles behave in the way it is expected that they behave, that apparently validates the theory.  The problem, though, is this: we are building technology that is built for the very purpose of validating a theory that is presupposed to be true. Fine, you might say, that is how research works: hypothesis, testing and evaluation.  However, we are applying a single lens to the analysis of the problem and that lens is built to specifically find expected patterns.  Again, that is what is required of the scientific method.  The problem lies in that we are building tools that are so many levels away from direct observation (for some value of “direct”, which I also realize is a problematic concept) that it is entirely possible that the technological imperative to find an answer has developed a tool that has built in it many assumptions of Truth in the existing model that ultimately it gives the scientist no choice *but* to verify the model.  

To use an analogy closer to direct observation: if we were to build a lens that was to determine whether there was a significant wavelength present in a beam of light, but through some design assumptions we attempted to amplify that particular part of the spectrum, but in so doing the actions of a kind of reverberation of other frequencies made that frequency appear to be there, we’d have falsely identified something we had already expected to find.  That wavelength may or may not actually be in the beam of light, but given that the experiment was designed to prove it’s existence, a false reality came to be understood.

All of this is really no different to me than the usual philosophical questions in epistemology and the like: how do you know what you see is really what you are seeing? The result of this line of thought, though, is that Science is a system of beliefs that are coherent with each other for the most part. There are inconsistencies.  There are other ways of explaining the world in many cases. Sometimes there are exceptions and the model doesn’t work (hmm… is a photon a particle or a wave.  It’s both?).  

Science can’t be allowed to represent Objective Reality without realizing that it represents only a way of thinking about how to interpret our world, much like ideology does in other realms.

Today we had a community crime prevention meeting for the members of the various strata in our area.  A member of the Vancouver Police force came to chat with us about problems (and perceived problems) in the area and ways to improve both our security and our sense of security.  

What was quite interesting was to hear the constable’s impression of our area: she emphasized that we actually are living in an area that is incredibly low in crime compared to other areas of the city.  That statement was interesting because the reason we called the meeting in the first place was that there had been a few break-and-enters in the last weeks of summer, and the residents were becoming concerned.  It was incredibly interesting, though, to hear about the VPD’s overall plans for dealing with this recent activity and then to compare our situation with other areas.  

A few miles from our location there are a series of residential towers.  Based on a sophisticated investigation over a number of weeks, the VPD gained enough evidence to warrant a search of one of the buildings.  In that one tower alone, 5 condos were found to have been converted into grow-ops; in several cases there was up to 18 inches of soil on the floor throughout the entire unit.  Essentially marijuana farms were tens or hundreds of feet in the air, right between people living rather normal lives who didn’t expect to be living in quite so close proximity to agricultural activity. 

What was amazing was the plea from the officer to the attendees of our meeting: please report any crimes you see, including those that happen to you or against your property. I couldn’t help but wonder who wouldn’t report crimes such as break and enters that happen to their own properties, but apparently such a lack of reporting is quite common.  Amazing.  

We eventually got into discussion of setting up a Block Watch program here, and finally we’re getting some traction.  The requirements are so minimal to get going, but it’s been historically difficult to get any people to actually commit to doing anything.  However, today we got solid commitment from at least a half dozen people, and I think more will come around.  

At any rate, we were treated to some excellent information and lots of face-to-face community building.

Among the things we learned about were:

• the crime statistics maps that are updated weekly on the VPD site
• block watch
• Our local community policing centre
• Safe communities events grants that a community can use to fund neighbourhood get-togethers to promote safer communities

Very useful meeting. Vancouver makes some amazing resources available and that’s probably just one of the many reasons that it rates so highly amongst the best places to live.

So far so good.  I’ve been rather impressed with a cookbook I bought recently: Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food.  

I’ve made only a couple of dishes from it, the Shrimp Pilau and the Sticky Lemon Chicken, but both were very simple to put together and had an amazing depth of flavour given the number of ingredients (few) and amount of prep time needed.  

Ramsay’s book presents recipes in a very useful way: combining courses of matched meals in sets that complement each other.  For example, the Sticky Lemon Chicken was grouped with a recipe for “Champ” (mashed potatoes with a fair helping of cream and green onions), and a caramelized banana split.  Each recipe stands on its own, of course, but prior to each grouping there is a description of when/where the grouping might come in handy (a luncheon or small dinner party, for example), but, most importantly to less confident chefs, a guide to the order in which you can make the most of your time in putting the dishes together (perhaps do the prep work for the banana split sauce, then begin boiling water for the potatoes, etc. etc.).  

While I’ve done only single dishes from this book so far, I can see the value in this approach. Timing is everything in cooking and this kind of example workflow is where an experienced chef usually outshines the newbie.   

In between episodes of semi-spastic swearing on his shows, especially the original UK version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay always emphasizes that simple, fresh and local ingredients are as vital to good cooking as is technique and a spotless kitchen and prep area.  His recipes in Fast Food stay true to that advice and are quite approachable for home chefs of many skill levels.