Touché, Google

My unscientific analysis of the new search engine Cuil (“From the makers of Google!”) was quite simple:

Search “pronounce cuil” with Cuil and you get eleven pages of mostly Celtic genealogy.

Search “pronounce cuil” with Google and you get ten pages, all about the pronunciation of the new search engine’s name.

Point to Google.

P.S. It’s “cool.”

La mémoire des anges

Watch the trailer for The Memories of Angels at Spacing Montreal. It is really cool.

I’ve never been to Montreal. As a young, pretty much unilingual (merci, public schools) Ontarian, Montreal has always felt like a gray anaemic has-been somewhere out past Kingston. I know that’s not a fair assessment and I’d like to see the city today… almost as much as I would like to see it in its prime!

The Montreal of this film is far more interesting than history lessons (those damn schools again) or Canadian popular culture (such that it is) have led me to believe.

[image] promotional still from NFB

[video] Spacing Montreal or NFB beta

“dirt on mccain”

My very favourite referring search in the short history of this blog.

Any politician who is felled by such a crude googling deserves it.

Minimum wage doesn’t reduce employment

The minimum wage, like most cogs in the welfare state, can be argued for on compassionate grounds alone. What is the minimum that an individual’s time is worth? If we let someone do a job for less than a decent amount, we are a poorer society for it, even if some of us are a little wealthier.

But then, by that argument one might justify a communist dictatorship. There comes a point when the costs outweigh the benefits.

So it heartens me to share with you some newly quantified benefits of raising the minimum wage. Two recent studies both found that a rising minimum wage doesn’t put people out of work.

The researchers say their findings may be due to the fact that a higher minimum wage attracts more workers and reduces a firm ’s vacancy rate; in addition, decreased turnover increases productivity and reduces the cost of expanding employment, they say.

It always makes me happy when it turns out the solution to any problem isn’t a race to the bottom.

[photo] “Counting coins” by Marion Doss

I won’t deny…

…that this seems to have become my new favourite phrase.

I promise to stop using it.

Free Parking in St. Catharines

A significant reconfiguration of downtown’s relationship with the car is already underway: Two-way conversion of streets like St. Paul and Ontario will slow cross-core travel but make downtown a more attractive place to live, work, and shop (not to mention easier to navigate).

At the same time, the prospect of free parking downtown is being mulled by the city’s movers and shakers. If I might strike a note of caution, as the benefits of two-way traffic might seem counter-intuitive to some, the cost of free parking might be equally opaque at first glance.

I won’t deny that St. Catharines is a city built on the automobile. I recall reading a while ago (but am too lazy to dig up the link) that the city ranks very poorly in public transit use. If people are going downtown, they are going downtown in their cars. Free parking seems like an obvious way to put downtown on more equal footing with the malls and “smart” centres in Niagara Region.

According to the city’s Downtown Creative Cluster Plan (remember that?) on-street parking in the core is already operating at 85 percent capacity. Future reconstruction of the Carlisle Street parking structure will probably further strain parking on-street parking. Considering downtown’s less than stellar reputation, I suppose it is good that so many people have a reason to be there. If parking were free downtown, it might actually make it less convenient to go there because you would spend longer looking for a place to park than is worth your time.

A conversation between the NY Times Freakonomics Blog and author Tom Vanderbilt reveals that St. Catharines may have already hit on the magic parking number (emphasis mine):

Q: It takes me an abnormal amount of time to parallel park. Am I somehow affecting traffic?

A: Urban street parking is one of those curious trade-offs. Some engineers hate street parking; they say it clogs roads (remember, a single double-parker on a street cuts the throughput in half) and causes crashes.

But others, and I view myself here, see it as an effective traffic calming device. People drive measurably slower on streets which are enclosed by rows of parked cars.

It’s searching for parking that’s more problematic, as Donald Shoup at UCLA shows us. Underpriced or free street parking causes significant amounts of excess traffic, as people “cruise,” or bargain hunt, for spaces. Meters should be set at rates, he argues, that ensure roughly 15 percent vacancy at any time. To paraphrase a cliché: there’s no such thing as free parking.

15 percent vacancy is 85 percent capacity; about where St. Catharines is today.

I wish downtown revitalization were as simple as introducing free parking, but until there is a significant change in demand or supply of parking downtown, we should concentrate our energies (and funds) elsewhere.

[photo] “Nice parking Debbie!” by ukslim

Meta Media

Via Clusterflock:

[link] “Vanity Fair Covers The New Yorker” at Vanity Fair

Safer Streets Through Social Disruption

The Star has been bludgeoning the Tories’ plans for crime and punishment in Canada all week. In summary, being “tough” on crime is expensive, ineffective, and creates more of the social disruption in which many crimes already have their roots.

I’m not going to deny that there are some people who are just broken. They are psychologically unable to exist in society, no matter what situation they find themselves in – good or bad. But the vast majority of criminals aren’t pathological axe murderers. There are a lot of people who made bad choices in times of stress, to pay off crushing debts, for example, or feed their families. In these cases, a job might be all it takes to get these people back on the straight and narrow.

The whole matter of incarcerating people who shouldn’t really be in jail for years got me thinking about two concepts used in scientific research that are applicable here: sensitivity and specificity.

Sensitivity is the ability of a test to correctly identify positive cases. For example, if 100 people commit homocide in a year and the justice system puts 95 of them behind bars, the justice system has a sensitivity (with respect to homocide) of 95%. This also means that 5% of murderers go free.

Specificity is the ability of a test to correctly identify a negative case. For example, if 100 innocent people are accused of murder in a year and 95 go free, the justice system has a specificity (with respect to homocide) of 95%. This also means that 5% of innocent people accused of murder are convicted.

I borrowed this chart from Wikipedia:

	Actual State of Guilt
		Guilty	Not Guilty
Verdict	Guilty	True Positive = 95	False Positive = 5 (type I error)	sensitivity = TP / (TP + FP) = 95 / (95 + 5) = 95 / 100 ≡ 95%
	Not Guilty	False Negative =5 (type II error)	True Negative = 95	= TN / (TN + FN) = 5 / (5 + 95) = 5 / 100 ≡ 5%
		specificity = TP / (TP + FN) = 95 / (95 + 5) = 95 / 100 ≡ 95%	= TN / (FP + TN) = 5 / (5 + 95) = 5 / 100 ≡ 5%

Even in science it is nearly impossible to establish a test with 100% specificity and 100% negativity. The better you get at sending all guilty people to jail – approaching a sensitivity of 100% – the more likely you are to imprison an innocent person – specificity falls. The same is true vice versa. If you want to ensure an innocent person never goes to jail, you have to accept that some guilty people will slip throught the cracks.

It’s been a while since I needed you use sensitivity and specificity, so I’ve almost certainly made a mistake in the numbers (maybe even the definitions) but the principle remains. Would you rather see all guilty people punished or all innocent people unpunished? We can’t have it both ways.

“The thing about madness, you see…”

Via TMN, The 10 Mental Illnesses Batman Indisputably Has.

I’m on a Batman kick right now. Give me a few days and I’ll be back to blogging about buses.

“Bored of the Internet”

Click to see full size.

I won’t deny that I think about blog-worthy material out in the real world.

More comics at xkcd.