Back in my early days at Crazy Go Nuts University, a drinking joke that always got a laugh described the “Four Stages of Tequila” as:
The ad shown below predates that joke, but the copy, which reads “If you’re a midget, FLESICHMAN’S makes you a big guy! 90 PROOF is why!” comes from the same basic thought:
(Picture courtesy of davebug and Miss Fipi Lele.)
This morning, I decided to voice my displeasure over a lack of visible progress by ICT Toronto, which purports to be a group whose mission is to make Toronto one of the world’s leading centres for information and communications technologies.
Strangely enough, an ICT Toronto breakfast meeting was held yesterday. The only reason I know about this is because Mark “Remarkk!” Kuznicki, whom I know from the DemoCamp/BarCamp scene, acts as a sort of advisor to them and attended that meeting and blogged about it this afternoon.
In his post, Mark reminds us that this is a government initiative run by “grey-haired folks” and unlike we Gen-Xers and Millenials who live in the “Web 2.0” world, they don’t move in web time.
I will counter by saying that even by the standards of the 1970s, ICT Toronto’s publicity effort is either lazy or pathetic. I’m not asking for them to start up a blog, wiki, RSS feed or instant-messaging setup or start setting up “unconferences” like BarCamp or DemoCamp. They could still be effective using tools that they’re comfortable with: press releases, networking with local technology and business journalists, hiring a PR agency or communications company to get the word out (and maybe freshen the web site, even if only once a month) — basically using publicity and communciations mechanisms that have been around since Ernst and Young were still earnest and young.
ICT’s silence is the sort of thing that makes people automatically associate the word “government” with “sluggishness and inefficiency”. This is why entrepreneurs and techies tend to have at least a mild libertarian streak.
The Canadian Opera Company and the Art Gallery of Ontario aren’t what you’d consider to be citizens of the world of Web 2.0, nor do they have the resources to devote to reaching a new audience in that world. They realized this and did the smart thing: they contacted a few prominent local bloggers and gave them “sneak peeks” at some of their events. The Canadian Opera Company number of us were invited to view the new opera house, the Four Seasons Centre, a few days before its grand opening. The Art Gallery of Ontario invited a number of us to a special session before the grand opening of their Andy Warhol: Supernova exhibit and even gave us a one-on-one interview session with its guest curator, David Cronenberg.
The end result was that both institutions were able to concentrate on what they do best — producing and housing art — and were able to reach a new audience of online world denizens by harnessing the power of interested bloggers and letting them do what they do best: communicating in the online world. Although the technology currently used to do so may be unfamiliar to the grey-haired crowd, the concept of inviting communicators to see your what you’re doing and then spread your message is older than the written word.
Simply put, ICT Toronto doesn’t have to be hip and “with it” in the Web 2.0 world: they need only to harness some of the citizens of that world, whose goals are aligned with theirs. It can be a team effort.
I’ll say it again: go read his post (and the comments as well). In addition to covering what happened at that breakfast meeting and what’s being done, Mark has some good suggestions. The most important of these is that ICT should embrace a role as being a convening body for the various communities of practice, interest and geography that make up the technology scene in the Toronto region.
In the meantime, I’m going to let my thoughts about ICT Toronto percolate over the weekend. As a reminder that I’ve made it a pet cause of mine to keep putting their feet to the fire, I’ll close with a little message for them, courtesy of the Stephen Colbert “On Notice Board” Generator:
After over 1700 posts at Tucows Farm, I’m shutting it down. I’ll still be posting Tucow sand programming-related blog entries — they’ll now appear at their new home, the Tucows Blog, located at tucowsblog.com.
In addition to my regular posts (which will return to their regular posting frequency), the Tucows Blog will also feature articles by other Tucows people. Don’t worry, the programming articles will be very clearly marked with these graphics:
…but be sure to read my coworker’s posts too — they’ve got lots of stuff that you might find very useful if you’re making a living off the web.
Back in April, the local press and various banks, investors and city councillors made a lot of hubbub about an initiative called ICT Toronto. The initiative’s goal was laudable: to boost the profile of Toronto in information and communications technologies, bringing us from the #3 area in North America in those fields (New York holds the #2 spot and Silicon Valley is #1) to #2.
I attended the press conference that ICT Toronto held to announce the final report on the current state of information and communications tech in Toronto and what is to be done about it back in April. As I wrote in this entry, the only actual techies there were me and the “DemoCamp Brain Trust” — everyone else seemed to be either an investment banker or someone who worked at City Hall. In a later entry, I wrote:
At the risk of alienating some big players in the local tech scene, I will state that I believe that not only is ICT Toronto’s task too important to be left to ICT Toronto; I think that we will have to accomplish that task in spite of ICT Toronto.
It’s almost five months later, and it appears that not much has happened. I haven’t seen a press release since the one for their launch party, and a Google News search for “ICT Toronto” ends up without any results.
As for their web site — actually a single web page — here’s what you would have seen had you visited it back at the end of April:
And here’s what it looks like now:
In the meantime, Toronto’s techies, without any of the money or manpower earmarked for ICT Toronto have held 4 DemoCamps and a BarCamp, events which have gone a long way to fostering a sense of community and cooperation in the local tech scene. And of course, actually building information and communication technologies, something the suits seem to have completely overlooked.
This is hardly surprising. Silicon Valley was born of good circumstances coupled with the grassroots efforts of ambitious techies doing what they loved, not by government/business fiat. I’d call ICT Toronto a bunch of pointless martini-swilling stuffed shirts, but that’s an insult to martinis and dress shirts, both of which I happen to like.
ICT Toronto’s going to have to do better than produce a glossy report and a party with decent hors d’oeuvres. I hope I’m wrong, but I seriously doubt that they’re up to the task.
It’s “The Other White Meat” taped to “The OTHER Other White Meat”.
John Scalzi may very well have earned the title of patron saint of Catmas by taping bacon to his cat.
Time magazine asks: Does God want you to be rich?
I wonder how the preachers at the megachurches would interpret Jesus’ “eye of a needle” comparison from Matthew 19:24.
In my last entry, I posted a link to an Economist piece in which they presented a pre-flight announcement that would be made if airlines told the truth. Some readers have stated in the comments that the statements in the article are incorrect, so I did some looking around. Here’s what I found.
In the Economist article, the hypothetical flight attendant stated that “in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero”. This is probably based on an article they published in December 2002 titled Help! There’s nobody in the cockpit! In the article, they quote Paul Jackson, editor of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, who asserts that a commercial airliner’s engines, which hang in “pods” beneath the wings, make such a landing almost impossible.
Wikipedia counters this assertion by listing a number of commerical airliners, at least one of which is a wide-body, which have had water landings and survivors.
Here’s what was said in the pre-flight announcement:
Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate.
The part about not using cell phones in the article isn’t quite right. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers did a study on real cross-country flights using a spectrum analyzer and found that the amount of power in critical bands was enough to potentially disrupt flight systems. It may be true that some airlines will eventually install base stations in aircraft, but in that case the power transmitted by the cell phones will be very low (the base station tells the mobiles how much power to use) and will not disrupt flight systems.
According to the FCC, the ban currently exists for both reasons: interference with ground networks and flight systems.
The FCC is currently looking into allowing cell phone use in-flight if the plane is equipped with a “pico cell”, a small specialized cellular base station installed onboard the aircraft. As the anonymous commenter says, having such a device as a go-between would reduce the radio power output of the cell phones (because they’d no longer be expending energy trying to reach ground-based cell antennas.)
In the hypothetical pre-flight announcement, the flight attendant also states that in military aircraft, seats are rear-facing because they are safer in the event of a crash. In the comments, Chris Taylor wrote:
On airlifters such as the C-130 and C-17, their integral seating arrangement is sideways (on sidewall and centerline seating), not facing the rear ramp. If they are flying in a troop airdrop configuration then the seating is stowed completely and the troops sit on the aircraft floor. When using seating pallets, those seats will be installed facing the front of the aircraft.
Very rarely do strategic or tactical airlifters fly with rear-facing seats these days.
Patrick Smith, author of Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot, states in a recent column that “It’s common to find rear-facing seats on military transports and some private craft.”
If any readers, particularly those who fly on military transport, want to chime in, please do!
That still leaves the question of whether backwards-facing seats on planes is safer. First let’s look to a form of transport where crashes are way more common: the automobile. One of the hidden upsides of lots of crashes is lots of crash data. The consensus based on this data is that backwards-facing seats are safer. Hence the design of safety seats for babies and very young children: they’re rear-facing.
(By the way, according to Ask the Pilot, although there was an Airbus A300 crash in November 2001 that got everyone scared about flying, there were only 34 airline fatalities between then and February 2005. During that time, about 1.5 billion other passengers — 8 orders of magnitude, or 100 million times more — flew and lived to tell the tale.)
This guy believes that rear-facing airline seats would save lives in the rare event of a crash and has been leading a largely fruitless campaign. Boeing 777 pilot Captain Lim of the site Ask Captain Lim writes:
Theoretically speaking, the safest seat is one that is facing to the back of the aircraft. Why is it so? A backward facing seat gives better protection to a passenger in the event of an impact because of the back cushioning effect on the body. However this is not proven in a major impact!
Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith concurs, and both he and Lim state that it’s passenger preference that keeps seats facing forward. I can understand that: my late Dad, a man with a medical degree, refused to make use of a Cathay Pacific sleeper berth, claiming he wanted to be sitting up “in case of a crash”. As the whole War on Terror has proven, when it comes to the perception of safety, emotion often clouds intellect.
There’s another reason why airlines are loath to make seats face backwards: marketing. The minute an airline does this, they’d have to explain why, and safety would be one of the reasons. The airline industry is not like the auto industry; they can’t market on safety. Once again, I quote Patrick Smith:
…there’s a risk factor that compels the airlines into a collective honesty. With casualties so rare, the statistical swing from a “safe” airline to a “dangerous” one hinges on select few events drawn from thousands, or even millions, of departures. Reputations can be lost through a single act of folly or stroke of lousy luck. Quite understandably, airlines have no desire to put their competitive eggs in such a precarious basket.