Blessed by the Potato

We’ve been doing some training lately, preparing for the worst. Specifically radiation disaster management. It’s a pretty interesting course, with some good take-home messages.

The first is that dealing with the (terrified) public can often be the hardest and least predictable part of disaster management, and in a radiation disaster situation that can be pretty bad. The public generally has exceptionally poor knowledge of what radiation is, how dangerous it actually is (yes, people have died, but it’s not nearly as dangerous as people are afraid it is), and what the difference between contamination and exposure are. We’re told that we have to explain physics concepts to the public at a grade 6 level, and that can be quite the challenge. Especially when you also have to deal with an attention span of maybe 1 minute. That speaks to me of a need for more general science outreach and education, something I’m all in favour of all the time (aside: notice the “science questions” topic tag — feel free to ask any, as this kinda sorta counts as a scientist working on educating the public ;)

For those of us worried about potential future terrorist attacks, there are a number of frightening scenarios thrown around. That of a dirty bomb or even a full-blown nuclear attack often top the fear lists. However, as our instructor today said, “I hope to hell that nothing happens, but if there is an attack, I hope it is radiological. We have detectors that go ‘beep’ at even very safe levels of background radiation. We can fairly quickly and very reliably screen those who have and have not been contaminated. We don’t have a meter for germs or nerve agents.”

Of course, we have to deal with the fear that the word radiation inspires. Sarin nerve gas is deadlier than the radiation in most dirty bomb scenarios, but thanks to poor delivery the attacks on the Tokyo subway resulted in only about 1000 casualties of some sort (those moderately ill with vision problems) as well as the 12 dead. For every sick person that showed up at a hospital tough, five more “worried well” came in to be checked out. So that’s going to be a huge issue with radiation, and hospitals are somehow going to have to deal with screening and even just corralling the thousands of frightened people.

An even bigger issue to deal with is the fear in the healthcare workers and first responders. Before training, many healthcare workers are afraid of radiation, and wouldn’t want to work on a person coming from a disaster or dirty bomb attack for fear of being contaminated themselves. Fortunately:

No caregiver in the history of radiological accidents has received a medically significant dose of radiation from treating a contaminated patient.

That includes the doctors and nurses who treated the firefighters at Chernobyl. It includes the rescuers at the SL-1 disaster. Now, that’s not to say that the environments can’t be dangerous — many firefighters did get excessive doses from going into the reactor at Chernobyl*. It’s not to say that it can’t happen that someone could get so contaminated that they’d put the rescue crews at risk, but it is exceptionally unlikely, and hasn’t happened yet.

* – a big part of that was poor training and misinformation: many of the figherfighters didn’t know it was a nuclear situation, they didn’t have the proper equipment or procedures in place to protect themselves — I can’t find a reference, but I’ve heard they weren’t even told to strip off their contaminated outer clothes after exiting the reactor. The USSR was too secretive for anyone’s good.

So for medical teams the issue becomes one they’re familiar with: stabilize the patient medically. Airway, bleeding, circulation. Only after those are taken care of do you worry about potential contamination and cleaning it up.

“There are no points for clean corpses.”

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Margaret Wente is a columnist for the Globe, so she doesn’t tend to do as much research as a journalist would (which, as you know from my disdain for the quality of mass media reporting, I don’t hold in especially high esteem either). So usually I don’t bother commenting on her mistaken ideas in the columns she writes, but this week’s missive on why professor’s don’t teach hits a topic that’s close to the heart, and also contains some really questionable logic.

“[Professors] can make $125,000 a year, with a good pension and six months off each year to do as they please. Their duties include sharing their research at conferences in Italy or Mexico, whose popularity hasn’t waned despite the advent of the Internet. Meantime, what many of their students need most is remedial instruction in basic composition. But there’s no future in that.

Setting aside the fact that no professor I know gets six months off per year, or that going to a conference is a sweltering, stinking mess of networking, politicking, and shameful self-promotion that is just about the opposite of a beach vacation as the article implies… setting all the nonsense in that one paragraph aside, how can it make the remotest bit of sense to have a professor making 6 figures teach remedial composition?!

I agree that the quality of teaching in universities could stand to be improved, and that teaching should be a higher priority in universities, and that professors should be held to a higher standard of interaction with their students. But the issues that many people are hanging onto with the problems in undergraduate education are really problems in high school education. Remedial composition, seriously? A university-bound student that can’t write an essay is an issue; a university graduate who can’t an even bigger one. However, the universities can’t really be expected to do the hand-holding and remedial stuff that shouldn’t be getting through the cracks of the high school system in the first place. I’ve long believed that Ontario went the wrong way in trying to save a few bucks by eliminating grade 13. The labour of graduate students is nearly free, certainly cheaper than a certified high school teacher, but nonetheless, these general education issues that are not degree-specific should be handled in high school where they belong. It’s unfair to the students to make them pay tuition to learn what should have been covered in their basic, government-provided education; it’s unfair to society to misallocate resources so badly that people that are specialists, even world-experts in their field, might be expected to teach basics and hand-hold students that don’t even want to be there. Of course, many universities (including UofT and UWO) do have classes for things like how to do research in the library, how to write an essay, how to make a CV/resume, how to do remedial math, etc. It’s just not part of the “curriculum” — it’s up to the students to seek out the help from the various workshops. And again, it’s not high school: a university student is expected to be moderately capable and self-directing.

Beyond that, teaching is considered a little more highly than her column indicates: at both UofT and Western, every student evaluates every instructor (and TA) for every class. Those evaluations are looked at, and serious issues are dealt with. Beyond that though, the question is raised: what metric tells you it’s broken? How do you know when a professor is not doing a good job in their role as a teacher? Students will beat up a “hard” professor in those comment forms more than they will one that can’t teach! The article quotes one professor who says that his departmental head never came to watch him teach — and that is probably true for many professors. However, if the departmental heads did pay attention to teaching, and sat in on a few lectures, how would that make things any better? Professors don’t have to take “how to teach” courses, and perhaps some do need that sort of help, but departmental heads don’t take “how to evaluate adult education” either. They don’t have to take on large courseloads as part of their job. Indeed, universities are very research-oriented, and despite the masses of undergrads taking up space on campus, they’re a bit of an afterthought in the whole system. It’s just where we get the next generation of grad students from. Maybe it would be nice if professors could opt to take on more teaching loads, and get just as much compensation and job security. That would require more money though — all sorts of organizations, from government to private industry provide funds for research (and here I’m focusing on my own area of the sciences), but you can’t get salary support for offering to spend more time teaching. It’s publish-or-perish (or perhaps more exactly, land-grants-or-perish) out there, and only a change to that method of employment incentivisation will allow for a change in teaching philosophies to take hold.

I’d love to see that, personally, for a number of reasons. As I pointed out a long time ago when discussing women in science*, the typical professorial life is very hostile to making a family: long hours, an encouragement to move between cities to stay at different universities, and basically zero job security until one gets too old to bother with children. Focusing on your teaching is similar: it just doesn’t lead to making your career as a professor any better (except for the warm feeling that you helped your unappreciative bratty students).

We just don’t incentivise teaching, and maybe if we did it would make for a better university system, and at the same time might fix the “women in science” problem. If there was the option for a professor to spend 80% of their time teaching and only 20% doing research, we might get better teachers, and more women in academia.

As someone who’s thinking of going into academia, I’m also 100% in favour of Margaret Wente’s dream world of six months off every year off to do whatever I want along with a 6-figure salary and a pension, and where the classes I do teach don’t require any prep work. Sounds almost as good as being a newspaper columnist: spend 20 minutes a week hacking out a column, send it off to the editor to fix, and then sit back on the deck of the cottage and wonder if you should have done some research on researchers first. Plus the only qualifications are an undergrad degree that you can acquire while stoned!

* – I know I discussed it at some length somewhere, but I can’t find it in the blog archives to link to. Maybe it was a comment on someone else’s website?

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A recent post at Toronto Realty Blog hit on a touchy issue: discrimination against rental tenants. The Star reports on the goings-on at the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

This is something that is important to me, as I am (a) male, (b) a student, and (c) have a cat. That puts me into several categories of discrimination, as it seems every landlord wants a female professional with no pets.

And I have to say: I can see the other side on that, as there are students (especially some males) who can just destroy a property — ruin a whole neighbourhood, for that matter. Broken bottles in the street and driveway, holes and graphitti on the walls, kitchens and washrooms that don’t get cleaned for years, and bass music to rattle your teeth all through the night. That’s not fair to anyone, the landlord in particular. There have been a number of student neighbours through the years that I would have love to have had evicted, and I wish sometimes that it was just a little easier for landlords to evict truly destructive tenants. However, not all males/students/pet owners are like that, so it’s also not fair to discriminate based solely on those surface features — and there are girls who are every bit as destructive (as Ben would surely demonstrate). I’m a good tenant: my cat is clean (and declawed), I pay rent on time, I keep the place in good repair, and just fix minor things on my own rather than bug my landlord.

I also have good references and credit to prove it.

And I think that’s where the first fine line starts to form: everyone has to live somewhere, and it’s not fair to discriminate against people and prevent them from renting or evict them just because of their race, gender, age, or pet. You have to actually evaluate the individual. As a landlord, especially a small one where the number of units you control wouldn’t form a valid statistical sample, I don’t think the government is ever going to force you to take a tenant you don’t want, as long as you give them a fair shake. But telling a person to buzz off just because of their race, age, pet, or other such factors is discrimination, and it’s not right.

In his post, D. Fleming says:

You know what else? I don’t rent to guys either. Boys, males, men, or gentlemen. […] Women are cleaner, quieter, and less likely to have ten friends over for UFC 101 and have a spontaneous ten-man tag-team match and put holes in the wall. I only rent to women, no questions asked.
[…]Is this discrimination?

[emphasis mine]

And of course: Yes, it is. I don’t want to begrudge a business person’s ability to make money, and I don’t want to force them to accept bad tenants or bad risks, but as commenter Dave (#6) pointed out, how is this different than a business not wanting to hire a woman because she’ll just get preggers and go on mat leave? There’s a line where prudent risk management slips into blanket discrimination, and a “no questions asked” policy is definitely on the discrimination side! Individual businesses may have to accept that to live in a society free from (or with a minimum level of) discrimination, they might have to be a little flexible in their standards to be more inclusive, and that might come with costs. As taxpayers, perhaps we should consider sharing those costs: it would be hella hard to enforce, but a default/excessive damage insurance fund for landlords from the government might be something to consider, similar to how EI helps pay for mat leave benefits.

Landlords in Ontario can’t demand security deposits, and I’ve seen enough abuses of those that I can see why — it’s very easy to inflate repair costs (especially when it’s your own time you’re charging for), and to include things that should be considered normal wear and tear. Once the landlord has the deposit, it’s very difficult for the tenant to get it back. There are of course issues from the other side, for landlords to seek reimbursement for damages from bad tenants after the fact, but they can do that. Especially if there is a lot of damage, like what’s seen in the student ghetto every spring around campus, then it becomes worthwhile to pursue the small claims court/tenant tribunal to get the money. With students and other low-income tenants there is the “you can’t get blood from a stone” issue, but by the same token, you probably couldn’t ask for a $10k security deposit, either.

However, the rent is negotiated on an individual basis, so landlords can charge more (or discount less off asking) to account for the increased risk, the same way that car insurance policies are way more expensive for boys under 25. People with bad credit, no job security/history, or poor references might have to take a risk-adjusted (advertised) rental rate, whereas better prospective tenants might be able to negotiate a discount.

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know the government can’t force a landlord to take a tenant they don’t want for whatever reason — if for no other reason than the relationship would be soured after the proceedings to make that happen. They can fine people though. There are issues with the OHRT, the rules, the processes, and the protections for both sides — nothing is perfect after all — but the fact that blanket discrimination is wrong isn’t one of them. However, the focus isn’t on these minor issues of preferences for gender or against students, where often a person can get a place to call home, even if not a particular unit. Rather, the OHRC is focusing on the people who can’t get housing at all: those on welfare, or with mental illness, so I don’t think D. Fleming has anything to worry about, even after publishing his discriminatory rental practices. “Where there are legitimate reasons for particular housing providers to deny housing to an individual, there still remains a societal and governmental obligation to make sure that this person is adequately housed.” The human rights guys are not out to go after individual landlords (especially small ones with just a handful of units), except in the cases where specific, egregious complaints have been made, but rather are looking at the problem society wide.

Some final quotes from the primary source:

Screening practices were a major concern for both tenants and landlords. Both
tenants and housing providers noted that the Code does not clearly set out
specific acceptable and unacceptable requirements and questions.

The Commission recognizes that housing providers have a legitimate interest in
being able to use non-discriminatory tenant screening techniques to select
tenants. The Landlord’s Self Help Centre noted that the process of screening
prospective tenants is a fundamental business practice used to manage risks and
stave off potential financial loss. A wide range of housing providers indicated that
it was important for them to be able to assess whether tenants would be able to
pay for rental units and keep them in good repair.

Housing providers were also concerned that they could be viewed as having
discriminated against someone because of a Code ground even if they have
rejected the tenant because of legitimate reasons such as bad references or
obviously inadequate income. Accordingly, there was an interest in having
greater certainty about what is and is not allowed. As the CMHA, Ontario noted,
the requirements must be flexible and balanced to protect the human rights of
tenants while at the same time protecting landlords from potential hardships.

So it looks like we’ll just have to wait to see what they decide on as they mull these issues over.

Toronto’s been facing weeks of a garbage strike, which while stinky and drawing criticism, is little more than an annoyance after a crippling surprise strike by the TTC last year. After watching the unions do this to the public time and again, with no thought to their pain (indeed, the unions often aim to cause the most collateral damage for publicity’s sake), it makes me wonder:

Why are there even unions in government jobs?

Is there really a fear that a government responsible to the people and partly elected by the very people on the government payroll would be subject to systematic abuses like coal miners from a century ago?

Plus as Gates VP pointed out in a comment on the TO garbage strike post at 4p, there’s the issue of “essential services”, and pretty much every government service is to some degree essential, otherwise we’d let the private sector handle it in the first place.

We’ve thrown around the idea “essential services”, but frankly, they’re all “essential services”. If we didn’t think the job was essential to the functioning of our community we would have left it to the private sector.

The whole point of government services are that we’ve all kind of agreed that we want these services to be available, for the greater good on a not-for-profit basis. Ideally, we want them at a sustainable but
competitive price.

So we can’t “tyranically” abuse them, we can’t underpay them, we just want them to make a fair living administering our programs in a timely fashion.

So why are the Unions even involved in government work?
Are we really worried that our government workers are going to suffer systemic abuse?”

Sure, some services (such as nurses or keeping transit running 365 days a year) are more “essential” than others (so what if Revenue Canada falls a few weeks behind in the paperwork — they’ll get around to collecting those taxes in short order), but at some point you have to wonder why unions get the right to strike at all when it goes against the public good, yet governments have their hands tied in terms of hiring someone who is willing to do the job (“scabs” in the union parlance).

Larry McDonald brought up a similar point.

Why are unions allowed to go on strike in sectors where government is the only legal provider? Unions + monopoly supply = gouging the user. There are no market forces to restrain the whims of public sector unions. Disputes in these sectors should be resolved through arbitration and follow private sector benchmarks.

And again, another article

In the public sector, union power isn’t counter-balanced by the possibility of a long strike driving their employer out of business, or excessive wage/benefit demands making them uncompetitive (cough, GM, cough). Look at the example of Buffet and the Buffalo News: he knew that a strike would drive the paper out of business; he communicated that to the mildly disgruntled workers. They knew that if they went to strike there was a good chance the paper would close and they’d have no jobs to return to. There is no such economic limit to government workers; we’d have to change the laws to put in some kind of restraint.

Can’t we just “de-unionize” government work? We don’t need to farm it off to 3rd-parties, we just don’t need unions. After all, I’m no fan of privatization, either: who needs to throw profit margin considerations into essential services, and take the control so far away from the voter and taxpayer? Especially with garbage, the last thing we need is some company to decide to cut costs by just throwing it in the lake when no one’s looking. Of course, we can’t piss away the benefits of not having to pay shareholders by overpyaing public-sector unions; then we might as well privatize just to counterbalance the strength of the union.

And I don’t necessarily disagree with the salaries and benefits — I hear that public sector workers make 20% more on average than the equivalent position in the private sector. If accepting that kind of job meant you had to give up the freedom to strike to keep society functioning, then that would probably be a good trade-off.

Even without unions, in the extreme cases people could still organize job actions — but it would involve quitting, en masse, with the government having the ability to replace them. Then negotiations would work more like a Dutch auction: the government could offer a package just sweet enough so enough people accepted it that they could continue to function. “Scabs” could be hired to keep things moving if someone was so upset they wouldn’t work. And of course, we’d have to make it illegal for a union to bully a competitor or the general public with their strike tactics.

The violence on both sides — the public backlash against the union, as well as the union’s goon tactics — can’t be tolerated, and I’m appalled at the stories I’m hearing: of people running into picket lines with cars, and of picketers stopping unrelated trucks for hours and intimidating the private sector collectors.

It’s not an easy thing to do. The example of Reagan and the air traffic controllers is often brought up… but that’s one of the only examples of breaking a union. As much as it probably should be done for the public sector, it’s not a trivial thing for governments to push through.

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It’s not hard to see from my previous posts that I’m a fan of electrified transportation (which is a pretentious way to say electric cars and PHEVs). So I’m generally in favour of the announced rebate for electric cars in Ontario. These sorts of rebates are great ways to get the cars into the hands of early adopters — if you can bring the price difference of the desirable technology down to the point where there isn’t a significant premium over equivalent cars, it makes it a lot easier for people to swallow their doubts about the new technology and get out there to beta-test. A few people will be willing to take the chance on the new models, but certainly not everyone, not until there’s a decade or so of real-world data, and to get that you need as many early adopters as soon as possible. It also helps draw attention to the technology so people will look into it (free advertising, basically).

I’ve seen some arguments about the rebates cropping up on the net, and I’ll address some points, but first a few of my own:

– I think it’s coming too soon. In July 2010 there will be basically zero electric cars available — maybe the Volt will see the light of day, maybe the Tesla Model S will be starting to deliver to people on the waiting list and ready for regular buyers… but that’s about it until 2011 or later. In that light it does seem less like a “electric car rebate” and more like yet another “Government Motors handout”. I mean, even if they do manage to get the Volt/Model S out in 2010, face facts, they’re almost going to California dealers anyway — delaying the onset to 2011ish to give other manufacturers a chance to catch up would be decent.

– Like I said, generally, this sort of thing works. It may not be the best use of the money, but getting people to switch to electric cars will reduce smog in the downtown core (and greenhouse gasses, and possibly help stabilize the grid). However, where electric cars work best is in urban areas where people commute every day… and if you’re going to spend money to get people to stop smogging up downtown Toronto/Ottawa, why not instead put the money towards under-funded public transit? (My answer, to myself: because there probably won’t be even 500 cars sold per year under this program, and 5 mil is a drop in the bucket to the TTC, so we can do both).

The Globe’s auto editor had this to say in favour of the subsidy:

The Americans have put in place a $7,500 US subsidy for alternative propulsion vehicles like the Chevy Volt. The Volt is a plug-in hybrid, though General Motors calls it an extended range electric vehicle. The U.S. subsidy mean Canada simply must keep up here.

This is absolute rubbish. In fact, if the Americans are doing it, that’s a perfectly good reason for us not to — now we know that someone will get the cars in the hands of the consumers so we get that precious kick-start to industry and the real-world data (though of course, that won’t be quite the same as real-world Ontario winters).

Now, if you want to argue that we should support the manufacturers to bring jobs here, then ok, cool, that keeping-up-with-the-Jones argument works… but a consumer rebate does not get Tesla or GM to build an Ontario factory.

One way that the main goals of this could be accomplished for free is a CARB/CAFE type legislation: force the automakers to have a certain percentage of electrics/hybrids and a certain overall fleet fuel economy. If they miss their targets by selling gas guzzlers, you fine them (and unlike CAFE, make them real fines). Then the manufacturers will have to raise the prices of the gas guzzlers and sell their fuel efficient models as loss-leaders to make their efficiency ratings… the quasi-free market at work.

It’s a subsidy for the rich — these cars will cost $30k and up.

I don’t have a good answer to that… does it matter to the government incentive program that the pollution reduction will come from “rich” drivers? Most new-car feebates work that way, but in theory the subsidy should trickle-down as lower resale prices for the people who will buy the cars used.

[Poor] transit-riders or cyclists, who are way greener, will be subsidizing expensive cars…

Ah, but they’re electric cars.

We have made-in-Canada electric cars that aren’t eligible for any kind of government help — they’re not even legal on Ontario roads!

Yes, the Zenn situation is somewhat tragic. The government doesn’t seem to be looking hard enough to create a neighbourhood electric vehicle standard… but even if they were road-legal I’m not sure that they should be getting subsidies because that’s the model we want to move away from with electric cars: we want cars that are better than gassers. Safer as well as more efficient.

Although I am sure rebates will work to increase sales of electric cars, I believe preferential treatment to drivers of electric cars will provide better incentive.

That’s a good point — part of the reason why California has more hybrids than other states is that for a number of years they were allowed to use the carpool lanes (and park for free in some cities). Free/priority parking is likely to be as much of an incentive as the cash, and HOV access might be too, if you happen to live in one of the few places in Ontario that has HOV lanes.

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