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Identifying gaps in wireless network infrastructure

About a month ago, I switched cellular service providers from Rogers to WIND Mobile.  Aside from the abysmal quality of the phone or more precisely, the Android operating system, I purchased for use on the new network, the cellular network infrastructure requires some work.  Indeed, WIND Mobile is well aware of this problem and has a page called Network Builder to report coverage issues.  It might be better if this process could be automated.

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A town cross

Saw this at a parade on the weekend…  When Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” I somehow doubt He had a U-Haul in mind.

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Wind-powered server farms

I finally registered a domain for myself, but it was somewhat of an impulse buy.  The hosting company was having a sale ($2.95/month, domain included), but that wasn’t what sold me.  It was the energy source for the servers: wind power.  Perhaps they have backup fossil-fuel-burning generators and maybe their offices aren’t nearly as green, but the folks at FatCow are mooving in the right direction.  They lacked some features I would have liked to have and their servers sometimes seem slow to respond (shutting down servers due to lack of wind?), but we all have to make sacrifices, right?

Oh, and until August 24th, if you sign up at http://www.fatcow.com/secret with code AUG295, you, too, can get web hosting on a clean-energy-powered server for a year for $2.95 per month.  I get $25 credit if you enter heresjono.com as your referrer.  Please do!

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Car with MPD

On Wednesday at the corner of Wilcocks Ave. and St. George St., a car appeared to be confused as to whether it was playing red light/green light or baseball.  At first, it stopped at the red light.  Then it slowly crept forward a few centimetres as if stealing a base before stopping again, repeating the process as if to say, “Ha ha, Red-light Camera!  If I go slowly enough, you can’t see me!”  It was about half way through the intersection when the light for its direction turned green and it was clear to go.  VROOOM.

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Send in the terrorists!

I’ve spent numerous summers abroad and missed Canada Day (July 1st) probably close to a dozen times.  However, this year I felt particularly unpatriotic despite singing O Canada in the Union Oyster House with some random Canadians from Kingston who were in Boston for the weekend.  However, after spending a few days in Boston as a tourist, I couldn’t help but become ensconced in feelings of American patriotism, feeling proud of America and its accomplishments, and a deep sympathy for its fallen heros.

Part of a memorial for those killed in action in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The memorial has one blank dog tag for each fallen American. They numbered 5400 when I visited.

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Let's scrap the long-form census!

The status quo for Canadian censuses is that one-fifth of households complete the “long form” of the census in its entirety and the remainder are given a much-abbreviated version of it.  The completion of the long-form census, until now, has been mandatory for those to whom it has been delivered under threat of fine and jail.  Census information is important to all Canadians; it is used by different levels of government, businesses, historians, scientists, and others for reasons as varied as planning infrastructure to creating employment opportunities.  The current governing party of Canada has decided, unilaterally, that punishing its citizens for failing to fill out some survey is unfair and that the penalty be abandoned.

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Scientific reporting in the popular media

Reporting of science in popular media such as newspapers and magazines is, in general, of dubious quality.  Journalists that report on science, it appears, need no understanding of science.  Causation and correlation; statistical significance and knowing something for certain; hype and expectation: in the minds of many journalists, these appear to be equivalent.  Can we blame them, though?  Even if a scientist’s work is faithfully reported, can we expect readers to keep these things separate?  Probably not, but the blame can then be placed on science education and perhaps a lack of space for an article.  Approaching an article on the effectiveness of the suicide barrier on the Bloor Viaduct in the on-line version of the Globe and Mail with my low expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised to find an embedded copy of the original report.  Kudos to the author, Anna Mehler Paperny, and kudos to the Globe.  I hope more organizations learn from this example.

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2nd International Conference on Computational Sustainability

At the end of June, I was in Boston for the 2nd International Conference on Computational Sustainability.  I think it had to be the most interesting conference I’ve attended to date; not only did I attend all but one session, I also managed to stay awake for each.  The one session I skipped was to compose myself before the poster session — I was cold from the over-airconditioned space and tired from having arrived at my Boston domicile at 2 am that morning, more than 15 hours after leaving Toronto by bus (the driver for the last segment of my trip got lost…  twice).  During this time, I did manage to update the HTML5 version of Inflo (more about this in another blog) and get a fully-working read-only demo running (or another demo graph).

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