Living a transparent life.

Since I’ve been thinking about how Facebook is used by the “environmental movement” (a fuzzy term, I’ll concede), I’ve also been thinking a lot about how Facebook is used more generally. What am I doing with it? What are my friends doing with it? And what will our world look like as we become more and more accustomed to a sort of shared stream of consciousness?

I get frustrated with the argument that new social media are going to result in a population that has only superficial knowledge about issues of importance. (I happened to flip through The Dumbest Generation in a bookstore on Saturday; I can’t offer a review because I have not yet read it, but that did seem to be the author’s main point; in other words, it updates Amusing Ourselves to Death.) What we do on sites like Facebook is a choice; our choices are obviously shaped by the medium, but the medium makes it as easy to communicate book recommendations as it does who was at last night’s party. I don’t update my Facebook status terribly often, because microblogging and tweeting strike me as a bit more work than they’re worth, but I like being able to share a little capsule of my thoughts with a much wider group than the circle of friends and family that I see regularly, and I want those thought-capsules to be interesting.

I want that because that’s my life. I can – and do – choose to share what I’m thinking or reading or working on. Many of my friends also share their own ideas, goals, creative activities, political interests. Sometimes these are issues that have wider significance, and sometimes they’re not, but those little capsules can drive all kinds of interesting directions of thought for their readers.

However: what about the stories about teenagers who send each other naked photos and are arrested for possession of child pornography, or kids who upload pictures of their illicit drinking? As a society, I think we’re still adapting to the fact that our lives are increasingly transparent;  the exponential increase in our ability to share information about ourselves and what we do has added new layers of richness to the ways that we interact, but it does reduce privacy as well. (I may blog under a pseudonym, but my Facebook page, after all, uses my real  name.) But what do I want to keep private?

I wouldn’t want my phone number or my address to be widely available to people who don’t know me face to face. I wouldn’t want to post many details about friends or family because I’d be taking away their choice about how present they want to be online. But my thoughts and ideas? I like to be able to share them. I like to know that I’m presenting a face to the world that’s as congruent with how I see myself, and how I try to act, as I can. That means that I try to use Facebook to talk about the things that I think are interesting – good books, important environmental causes, and so forth – as well as to kick ass at Word Twist on a regular basis.

The internet is not going to disappear, no matter how many curmudgeonly people wish it and it’s consequences away. We can learn to adapt to them, though, by thinking about what we do online. Not that it needs to be serious: I love xkcd and cuteoverload and lolcats, and I love coming across bits of the internet that are creative, whimsical, and fun. I also love the fact that Science Blogs exists to create an ongoing conversation between scientists and non-scientists, and that social scientists and lawyers can blog about their professions and ideas, as well as about policy and politics. I love that I can take what I’ve learned and share it. If stupid content exists, then the answer is not to condemn the platform but to create new and better content of one’s own. Social media are part of that, because they’re such a powerful way to share that content.

Another view of the heron

Of the pictures I got of the heron, this is my favourite.

Great Blue Heron at Smith's Falls

DSC07951

Originally uploaded by tariqata

(Still figuring out what I can do with Flickr and this blog!) Rob and I spotted this heron hanging out around the locks at Smith’s Falls. He was, happily, very amenable to repeated photographing, and even hung out long enough for me to run to a pharmacy for replacement batteries.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Figuring out Flickr!

But it sure took me long enough!

John Baird, showing us the CPC's classiness.

Let me be clear: I don’t have a lot of respect for the current municipal government in Toronto. I voted for David Miller in 2006, but only as a least-worst choice (I didn’t want to see the other two front runners for mayor, Jane Pitfield and Stephen LeDrew, take office). Royson James has summed up their focus on petty issues at the expense of substantive action on the real issues that are facing the city, and it’s worth a read.

However, John Baird’s “off-the-cuff” remark that “Twenty-seven hundred people got it right. They didn’t. This is not a partnership and they’re bitching at us … They should fuck off…” with respect to Toronto’s request for federal funding for new streetcars? That’s definitely showing off the class I’ve come to expect from the Conservatives.

According to the Star article, Toronto submitted a single request for funds for a fleet of new streetcars, which are very much needed, and the request was rejected because it did not meet the local job creation criteria that were written into the stimulus bill. I think that the criteria were written too narrowly in this case, because although no jobs would be created in Toronto, several hundred jobs would be created at the struggling Thunder Bay Bombardier plant. I would have been quite happy if the city government had included a few other infrastructure projects in their funding application – perhaps including the maintenance facility that is mentioned here – but the streetcars are needed, the deal is already in place, and it would benefit a significant number of people in one of Ontario’s Northern cities. It’s a shame the federal government set such a dogmatic rule to qualify, and so openly expressed their contempt for the city while they were at it.

The rejection of the request for stimulus funds means that the Toronto Transit Commission will not be able to close the deal on the streetcars unless cash is forthcoming from somewhere else (the deal must be funded by June 27), and Thunder Bay will not be able to benefit from the jobs created by the deal.

Mr. Baird, if your party is trying to win seats in this city, you’re doing it wrong.

The summer's wasting.

And it’s barely even started yet.

I haven’t been writing here much (okay, at all) because – as noted in March – I’ve been concentrating on the writing that somebody else is expected to read and then assign me a letter to indicate the quality of my work. Writing, I believe, is one of those things that one gets out of practice in; so is reading books with a bit more meat to them than, say, Honor Harrington novels. Besides, I’d rather write the literature review for my thesis in the next three months, when I don’t have to do anything else. So, the summer project for Sammy’s Dot will be an ongoing series of reflection on a self-directed reading program.

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No one is an island.

The links between agriculture and human health are complex. Anyone who’s read Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel will be familiar with the notion that many devastating diseases – smallpox is perhaps the most obvious – crossed to humans from their livestock. However, those people who lived in close proximity to each other and to their animals eventually developed a degree of resistance.

There is, I think, a powerful tendency to imagine that this interplay between human and non-human is in the past, or at worst, still occurring in some parts of the world (China, Africa), but not North America.

One of my profs has done quite a bit of research into the outbreak of E. Coli O157:H7 in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000, and he would argue that’s certainly not the case. In a paper on the topic, Ali (2004) noted research that suggests that the virulence of that particular strain of E. Coli appears to be at least partly due to its ability to survive extreme environments, including the highly acidic environment of the stomach, and it may have acquired this ability through exposure to acidified soil and water. The acidic soil and water, of course, was the result of acid rain, caused by human activities which emitted sulfur dioxide into the air. Ali (2004) also stressed the fact that while the virulent strain of E. Coli is believed to have emerged first in Argentina, it is now widespread across North America. The human role in the transmission of the disease is better understood than our role in its creation. Many people have pointed out that E. Coli O157:H7 is particularly dangerous because it can survive high heat and freezing, and so poses a risk to anyone who buys meat which is contaminated; Walkerton also proved that a breakdown in the containment systems of intensive livestock operations or a breakdown in a water utility can put people at risk of illness or death.

With all of this in mind, it was interesting to read Nicholas Kristof’s column in The New York Times today:

One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in — and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.

MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a disease which I at least have always thought of as a disease one is most likely to contract in hospital. Kristof’s article suggests that assumption is a dangerous one. Even if one cannot contract MRSA by eating pork, which is likely as it is typically transmitted by skin contact, many people work in the livestock industry. They can transmit the disease to each other and to their families and friends as well as contract it from contact with their animals. They might also spread it to healthy animals, and in today’s agricultural system, livestock may be sold and transported across a distance, further increasing the number of potential infections.

Kristof’s story is not finished:

So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.

And his story is raising old questions about the safety of antibiotic use in agriculture. But it’s one that needs to be asked continuously, because we have not yet addressed the potential harms of the way we raise crops and livestock. I don’t think anyone can deny the raise them – we too will be affected.at more food is available at lower cost – at least in North America – than in the past, but there are also unintended consequences, and we cannot escape them.

We need to remember that although we no longer share close quarters with the animals we raise for food, we are still embedded in the same, increasingly complex, ecosystem that they are. When those animals are afflicted by disease – partly because of how we raise them – we too are affected. Until we recognize this in our food policies, this will continue.

Ali, S. Harris. (2004) “A Socio-Ecological Autopsy of the E. coli O157:H7 Outbreak in  Walkerton, Ontario, Canada.” Social Science and Medicine 58(12): 2601-2612

The first step is asking the right questions.

I’ve got approximately ten weeks to hammer a whole lot of vague-ish thoughts about the environment and politics into a proposal for my senior honours thesis. I’m going to be spending some blogging time trying to sort through the questions I most want to try to answer, and theoretical ways that I might answer them. If any readers exist, comment is welcome.

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The best plot summary ever.

From Neal Stephenson’s Anathem:

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”