With Or Without U

My alma mater Waterloo has generally not had a great football team. They had a golden era of sorts in the 90’s, when they were a perennial contender. I could point out that their good era coincided with my time at the school, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone.

Unfortunately, it went downhill after I left. The lowlight was a one-year suspension following a steroid scandal, followed by a brutal six-year run with a combined record of 4-44. But now it appears that the team is much improved. So when I remembered that they had a big test against Western yesterday, I was curious how it went.

So here is the record of my quest to find the score of yesterday’s Western-Waterloo game on the Internet. This shouldn’t be asking too much; this is the Information Age, and I just want a tiny piece of information. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, it’s amazing how often we can’t seem to convey information. And it all gets worse when you combine it with the giant national shrug that is Canadian university athletics (or U Sports, as it is now officially branded.)

Remember, this isn’t some obscure event, it’s a football game played approximately 24 hours earlier, featuring one of the most storied sports programs in the country:

SportsNet.ca:

• Choose “More/U SPORTS” off of the top menu. I’m greeted by a month-old story about Duke’s Canadian tour
• I choose “Men’s Football” off the U SPORTS sub-menu.
• I’m given a list of the weekend’s games, which immediately refreshes to show a list of next-weekend’s games. I can’t seem to find a button to go back a week. There’s a “Previous month” link at the bottom, but it doesn’t work.

TSN.ca:

• I choose “Sports” from the top menu, which drops down a list of sports and leagues. NCAA is on it, but U Sports isn’t.
• I choose “More Sports” at the bottom of the list. It pops-up a second list of choices, including U Sports, though it’s below “Jay and Dan”
• I’m greeted by a list of stories, the newest of which is more than two months old. The fifth-most recent story is about Western winning the Vanier Cup last year.
• I can’t find any link for scores: the U Sports sub-menu just has an entry for “News,” which is the page I’m at. The score ticker at the top of the page only has CFL/NFL/MLB/NHL/MLS

CBC.ca:

• Hit “Menu” link
• Choose “Sports” from “quick links” list
• Try “scores” heading, but it only has NHL/MLB/CFL/NFL/MLS
• Try “More/All Sports” this sends me to a list of sports that includes entries for the Commonwealth games, Red Bull Crashed Ice, and Spruce Meadows equestrian, but no University sports

GlobeAndMail.com

• Choose “Sports” from top menu
• Choose “Football” from Sports menu
• There are several stories listed, I click one labeled as “U Sports roundup”
• A pop-up tells me that this content is only available to subscribers

TheStar.com

• Choose “Sports” from menu
• There are articles arranged into several categories depending on what team, sport, or city they are about, and which columnist wrote them. There’s nothing on University sports, and only three articles in the “Football” section, all on the NFL.

NaitonalPost.com

• Choose “Sports” from main menu, and “Football” from sub-menu. The sub-sub-menu only has CFL and NFL options
• Try “All Sports” item instead. That page has many sports articles, but I couldn’t find any on Canadian University sports. There’s a “Scoreboard” box, but it only has NHL/NBA/MLB/NFL/CFL

I then gave up on national sports outlets, and when to the Waterloo Region Record, site, where I quickly found a recap of the game. Unfortunately, Waterloo was about as successful as I was looking for info on the game, in which Western won easily, 67-7.

Sword Fight

There's this phenomenon I've noticed in activism, and I don't know if it has a name. It's when people waste their efforts on useless endeavours. There's a number of different reasons why:

• working harder to piss off The Man than on actual change
• fighting sectarian battles
• working for esoteric intellectual goals, not what actually helps
• laying the groundwork for idealistic concepts that will never come to be

The commonality in each of these is that they're overthinking the situation. It can be just a case of wasting effort, but what's really frustrating about it, is when people actually end up working against themselves. For instance, there was this case a few years ago when someone was trying to convince poor people not to vote as a protest. You'd think that voting would be a no-brainer for activists, but here you have people voluntarily forfeiting it, for no reason but their own over-analysis.

I've always had a theory that this activist tire-spinning is at its worst in times and places where liberal ideas are favoured. That's when activists are indulgent, and don't consider that they must eternally struggle against political enemies. When progressive ideas fall out of favour, activists are forced to fight for everything, and can't afford to waste effort. They think about what's truly important, fight for their priorities and compromise on those things that don't really make a difference.  It forces a rigorous efficiency.

I first came to this way of thinking in university. Universities are ripe for these problems to begin with, being filled with liberal intellectuals. And Canada is ripe for it, with our liberal leanings, and interventionist government traditions. People often take that for granted, and don't consider that others are working to roll back past progress. And this being the nineties, we'd had decades where the only conservative force was the Mulroney government, who in retrospect was hardly regressive. So an activist in this environment would feel quite unchallenged.

But there were plenty of hints that all was not well in progressive world. Newt Gingrich was trying to remake the American government. Here in Ontario, Mike Harris was handing out torches and pitchforks to angry suburbanites. And in pop-culture and word-of-mouth, it was clear that political correctness had become a lightning rod that was being used to demonize lots of positive actions.

I observed that this negativity seemed to be forcing American activists to think about what was important to them in a way that Canadians - particularly those around me on campus - didn't. I remember that when Bill Clinton's infidelities came out, Canadian feminists were ready to throw him under the bus, while American feminists defended him; they understood that a cad in the White House is a small price to pay to have a charismatic politician working against the conservative tsunami.

But now I think I may have to throw out the theory. It's because of what I'm seeing from African-American activists. You would think that if I'm right about political challenges forcing people to adopt a battle-tested robustness, then Black Americans in the alt-right era would be about as efficiently pragmatic as possible. And yet, I keep finding people disappearing into a spiral of opaque justifications of nonsensical actions.

The latest concerns a meme you may have seen recently. A white woman on the campus of Colgate University went around campus carrying a sword. Why she had a sword is a bit of a mystery - I thought Americans preferred guns. Anyway, her prancing around with a sword didn't seem to concern anyone, and was generally greeted as a whimsical prank. She goes on to report that months later, the campus was put on lock down after reports of a gunman. That turned out to be the result of someone seeing a black man with a glue gun and panicking. So now the woman is passing the story around as an example of white privilege: When people saw her they assumed the best, while they assumed the worst for that black man.

You would think that this meme would be welcomed by black activists. A white person finally understands white privilege! And she's explaining it to other white people! But no, in the upside-down world of activism, this woman's actions were criticized for... well - I don’t really know, but it sure has made the author of this article angry.

Obviously, you can understand why black activists would be frustrated by the circumstance. It’s unfair that this white woman gets credit for making point that blacks have been trying to make for years. But the writers of this article don’t seem to realize the unfairness is not her fault. I’m left wondering what exactly she should have done that would have been better. It’s telling that the author goes on to express frustration with white allies - a complaint I’ve heard a few times. If spreading your message for you leads to frustration, it’s hard to imagine how that relationship could work out better.

So here we are in an era of high racial tension, and people trying to fix problems are getting shouted down. It's not quite talking your own cohort into not voting, but it is the sort of  intellectual time waster I'd hoped we'd left behind.

Badly-Cooked Food For Thought

There's a story going around the Internet about American university students who have been complaining that their cafeteria is guilty of cultural appropriation. It's easy to see how that would get people's attention: many sins are committed in university cafeterias, but cultural appropriation had got to be a new one. Now they'll just need mail-fraud to complete the set.

If you're not familiar with it, cultural appropriation is the idea of taking another culture's symbols and using them for your own purposes. That fashion house that used Inuit designs for their own clothing is a classic example.

The concept is controversial, since it's hard to pin down, and potentially widespread. It's easy to come up with obviously bad examples, but it's also easy to come up with innocent, or even obviously positive things, that an extremist would consider appropriation. If I try to make my own pad thai, it would be hard to claim that as unfair to the people of southeast Asia.

And in this case, it's also hard to accept the students' criticism. Look, I spent longer in university residence than anyone really should, so I definitely wouldn't deny them the right to complain about school food. But, well, that's just the problem: this food is just bad, not disrespectful. And I should point out that I discovered that dorm/residence food is bad not because of the skills of the cooks, but primarily because of the poor supplies they have to make do with. And that just further explains the substandard dishes the students found: the cooks appear to be attempting to diversify, but without access to proper ingredients.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the students know all this, and just came up with the cultural angle because it was the only way they could get the administration to do something about the food. I have to admit that while my first thought about this story was that the students were misguided, my second thought was that I wish I'd thought of that. One particularly memorable bad meal from the residence cafeteria was a curry that somehow came out as bland. That was one of those mind-bendingly bad meals that wasn't just really bad, it was bad in an entirely unexpected way, if not a completely impossible way. If I'd thought of complaining that it was insensitive to students of South-Asian extraction, I might have gained some traction with the bureaucracy.

So no, I don't think there's grounds to believe the university is guilty of cultural appropriation. Just ask the white kids what they think of the school's rubber steaks and you'll see that there are some circumstances where all cultures are equally abused.

Hi-Res Monitor

In my last year of university, I remember a dormmate asking how we were going to deal with living in normal places. Here we were living in a very social format, but in the real world, everyone is very private.

Just so you don't get the wrong idea, our residence floor was hardly a stereotypical university living space. It was fairly restrained and nerdy even by the standards of the University of Waterloo. But still, it's a very different situation: you have a private room (or at least, as private as you want it to be) and pretty much everything else is communal. Compare that to my current apartment, where I don't know most of my floormate's names, much less organized late-night StarCraft tournaments with them.

My answer at the time was to point out that I had read about an experimental building where people were housed in more public circumstances. You get your own apartment, but there are also nice lounge areas outside to socialize with neighbours. I think it was in Vancouver (Big surprise.) I had the same worry about leaving the inclusive society of the university residence, and was a little scared of the lonely life of a single adult.

Today it's hard to believe I felt that way. When I imagine ideal accommodations, it's usually getting away from my neighbours, rather than getting closer to them. Maybe I've grown up, or maybe I've gotten used to a new paradigm. But I think it's a different reason: there's essentially two strategies for getting along with your neighbours: get friendly with them, or try to get away from them. Our residence was built on the first strategy, but most living circumstances in the western world are based on the latter.

But maybe things are changing. The Atlantic has an article about a company offering dorm-like accommodations to the general public. It's in Syracuse, New York (genuinely big surprise.)  The article mostly looks at it from an angle that the concept appeals primarily to millennials - before pointing out that they've had interest from all ages. So perhaps there is hope for a new way of living, and an appetite for it.

Assessing Threats

Last week, Wilfrid Laurier University here in KW was locked down after someone online posted a threat of a shooting in the science building. Of course, locals were shocked: who knew Laurier has a science building?

Okay, that's just my UW heritage talking, sorry Laurier folks.  Anyway, the person who made that posting was in London (England.) He got arrested, and just spent nearly three days in jail before posting bail. He was interviewed upon release, and it came out that:

• He didn't think this would happen, or that it would be taken seriously
• He doesn't know anything about Laurier, and was only copying it's name from another post.
• He assumed that freedom of speech covered this sort of thing

That last part jumped out at me. It's a concept that a lot of people online seem to think: that freedom of speech is absolute and allows any sort of speech in any circumstance. Most people - both inside and outside the legal profession - will know that there are practical limits on free speech. The classic (i.e., quoted on Law & Order) example is that you don't have the right to shout, “fire” in a crowded theatre.

But now we have a couple of problems: in the Internet age, you can yell “fire” from the other side of the planet, and there's a lot of people who think freedom of speech means freedom from consequences.  Actually, three problems: there’s also our increasingly fuzzy definition of irony.  Afterall, our perpetrator said he didn’t think his threat would be taken seriously, since it was on 4chan, a site known for pranks.  I can see how a person might assume that, since many things of questionable taste happen there without affecting the real world. But the flipside is that if a person were to plan a shooting rampage, an untraceable discussion board is exactly where they would talk about it.

We’re left with a big overlap between what people think is acceptable online, and what raises red flags for law enforcement.  So we’re going to have to create some new understandings about what is legal, and someone is going to be very disappointed.

Alma Matters

A few days ago I received a call from the university alumni association asking for a donation. Of course, they don't immediately ask for money, there's a few other questions first. 

I don't want to sound too cynical - I understand that the university needs money, and asking for it up front is both unprofitable and impolite. But it is a bit, um, artificial to pretend the call is to make sure you still have my contact information correct. They did, after all, call me.

But they also talk about the new buildings on campus. Again, I understand: it's a nice segue to asking for money. But they always seem to bring it up by asking if I've been to campus lately.  So I have to ask, what am I supposed to be doing on campus, all these years after I've graduated? Both the alumni association and newsletter make it sound like I should hanging out there on a regular basis, but I can't really think what would bring me to campus to see all the new buildings my donation helped pay for.

Sure, I have been back to campus since graduation: a few times I've used the library, and I've researched grad school possibilities. But being in a fast-changing field, and knowing about the Internet, there's less reason to actually go to their library. If we had, you know, school spirit, I might go to football games. 

Eventually, when they ask if I've been to campus lately, I'll just say, I don't remember, have you had reports of some creepy old guy hanging out nearby?

Wouldn't You Prefer An "End Of August Sale?"

When I was in school, Back-To-School ads used to bother me, as an unnecessary reminder that summer was eventually going to end. The record earliest was two weeks into summer, and the record stupidest was from a car dealer. In retrospect, I realize that one was supposed to be ironic, but it wasn't too funny at the time.

It was understandable that stores made a big deal about it then: there was a lot to buy for school because so much of it was consumed or wore out: pens, pencils, paper, binders, bags.  You had to stock up on all you would need during the year because in those pre-Staples days, you didn't know when you could get it for a reasonable price again.

It seems to have changed with technology, though. The ubiquitous lined binder paper used to be an easy loss leader (I still have a box of it that I'm trying to get through.) But today it's more about technology, which doesn't really have to be replaced every year (trust me, I made it to 1992 writing reports on a Commodore 64.) But parents with the combined panic of back-to-school and fear-of-technology could be easily manipulated by their kids to get everything replaced with the latest models now.

Which leads me to this Future Shop ad where they have the teenagers walking out dressed as the academic superstars they are supposed to become: astronauts, surgeons, rock stars. And now I'm glad that I only had to deal with a reminder that school was about to start again, not pressure to be exceptional. Once again, in our fast-advancing technological world we're expecting too much from today's kids.  It makes me glad I came from good old no-hope Generation X.

Warning: Labels

This week there was a proposal from American university students to have content warning labels on books used in school assignments. We all had a good laugh at it. Can you imagine, warnings that literature might give you feelings. Nanny state, political correctness etc.

But is it really asking too much that a sexual assault victim get fair warning that there's a rape scene in a book? Here's an article about the original action from the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper. It's really not the Orwellian threat everyone is making it out to be. Nobody's asking for anything to be banned or censored.  All they're asking for is warning.


What this has revealed is that PTSD still isn't taken seriously. It seems that our society has a cycle when it comes to dealing with a new mental illness:

• the sufferers make their case about getting a little consideration to better cope with their illness. 
• Everyone else treats their illness as equivalent to the ordinary emotions everyone copes with.
• the concerns are dismissed along with some insults and questioning of the victims' courage.

Today, PTSD survivors are just going through the same routine we've already been through with depression. Most people have moved beyond telling the depressed to just suck it up. But we're still okay with accusing trauma survivors trying to avoid flashbacks of hiding from reality.

A couple of caveats: I can understand professors fear of this policy.  Universities have done a poor job of creating power structures that balance the rights of students and faculty, and professors already live in fear that a particularly determined student could make life hell for them with complaints.  This policy offers another avenue for that possibility, so I'm betting professors will err on the side of too many warnings. But as I say, that's a pre-existing flaw in the university structure.

Secondly, yes, students and their organizations will likely abuse the system by claiming triggers on virtually everything they find offensive or just objectionable. But I wouldn't reject a policy just because it means administrators will have to keep saying no to every demanding activist group.

Duly Noted

Whenever I had to write essays in high school or university, I had trouble with the footnotes.¹ The impression I got from teachers' instructions was to footnote anything that I got out of a book or any other source. But that always led to dozens of notes; far more than anyone else. And, far more than the teachers expected, since they would dock marks for using too many.

Occasionally I would back off and try to footnote fewer things, but without fail I would then get an angry message that I hadn't noted enough things. This was made worse by the fact that teachers and profs would always deliver that particular message through an abstruse accusation of plagiarism.²

I think now I have a better handle on it: you're noting anything the reader should know the original source of, whether it's a little known fact, or the ideas and opinions of others. Too bad I don't have a chance to ever use that knowledge now.

I mention this because it occurs to me that the web can be seen as a big set of essays, with the links as the footnotes. And often those notes are added for the same reasons: credit where credit is due, our backing up facts.

Usually in this blog I've added links to other topics to provide background for readers who may not be familiar with a topic. Sometimes I've used a link to provide evidence of a fact I've mentioned. I wonder if I should do more of that. In the throbbing vortex of misinformation that is the Internet, the definition of "disputed information" is much bigger than it would be in am academic essay.³ It might be a good idea if we all started working harder to link to sources just to stop the nightmare scenario of everyone providing their own facts and simply trying to out yell each other.


1. Or endnotes
2. Keep in mind that in those pre-internet days, actual plagiarism was rare, so the teacher could do this schtick with everyone understanding the accusation wasn't real. I don't know what they do now that real plagiarism is much more common.
3. Consider how many web sites and the communities around them would consider evolution, global warming, or equality of the races and genders to be open questions.

Well York U Too

Recently, York University has been running ads like this one, featuring current students talking about their future accomplishments:

I appreciate achievement and aspirations as much as anyone. So why do I hate these ads?

An obvious reason is that these are young, idealistic university students with dreams of great, world-changing accomplishments. That's me from twenty years ago, before I became bitter and pragmatic.  But really, I think there's more than just personal reasons for not liking the ads:

• What the world needs isn't more breakthroughs - we've had plenty of those. What we need in a general improvement in our maturity. If anything, we need to get past the idea that brilliant people will invent our way out of current problems.
• This is such typical university thinking: total focus on high achievement, total ignorance of the majority of students.  Really it's that good-but-not-great majority who pay most of the university's bills, and carry most of society's work.
• They're such generic dreams: landing on Mars? Curing cancer? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see that happen.  But anyone who's been paying attention in recent decades has noticed that innovation no longer works that way.  Technological innovations are rarely predictable ahead of time, and medical progress is a series of unheralded advancements, not massive breakthroughs.
• They also seem to be an old-fashioned view of the future, if that makes any sense.  Space travel? Vague discussion of curing diseases?  What about genetic engineering, nanotechnology, data mining.  Trade your Asimov in for some Gibson.
• For that matter, they're not even realistic time frames.  Another ad talks about the first human on Mars in 2027.  Fourteen years?  Who's going to believe that?
• If I could offer advice to current and future university students, it's that you can't be aiming at pre-planned ideals of success.  Instead you have to be willing to be flexible in your life goals, and derive self-esteem from a wide variety of accomplishments.  If you've already written a life story, you're setting yourself up for disappointment regardless of which university you choose.

This Is Beeping Annoying

Today I was walking downtown, and I could hear the constant beeping of a large truck backing up.  I looked around for something along the lines of a dump truck, but I couldn't see any such truck, reversing or not.  The largest reversing vehicle was a parallel-parking SUV.  So I though maybe SUV's had finally gotten so big that they'd had to use the beep warning too.

But then I saw that it was actually a cherry picker at a building being demolished across the street.  It wasn't the occasional beeping of someone trying to manouver the machine either; it never stopped.  At first I assumed that the warning must go off not just when it's reversing, but also when someone is lowering the platform, to warn people underneath.  But no, the beep kept right on going even when it was totally motionless.

That's a pet-peeve of mine: overwarning.  If the beeping is going on all the time, people will just ignore it.  No one is going to look around (or up) when they hear it, because it will just be part of the background noise of the construction site.

It reminds me of a house I lived in during university.  It had a really sensitive smoke detector.  That sounds safe, but the problem was, it went off if you set the toaster too high.  Anything beyond my super-light-why-bother-toasting-it toast was pretty much guaranteed to set off the alarm.  We complained about this of course, but a house of male university students complaining that the smoke alarm goes off when they cook is not going to be taken seriously.  The sad part is, we were so used to cooking setting it off that our first reaction upon hearing the alarm was to open the windows to air the house out and hopefully stop the alarm.  But opening the windows is a bad idea in a real fire, since the fresh air will feed the flames.  So in this case, making the smoke detector more sensitive actually made it more dangerous.

I don't want to sound like an uncaring person who just doesn't want to be bothered; I do like the idea of alarms and want to be warned in a dangerous situation.  But we have to find a happy medium in which we don't dilute the meaning of warnings.

And I Thought I'd Never Use The Word "Frosh" Again

Usually I don't notice Frosh week now that I'm out of university.  But this week, it was hard to miss in Canada, thanks to the frosh event at St. Mary's University featuring an offensive chant.

It used to be that frosh week was unregulated and anarchic.  But by the time I went through froshdom in 1992, it was starting to be tamed, and there was more oversight and regulation added in the next few years.  You might think the student body would find that intrusive, but most people I knew welcomed the changes, as there seemed to be a general perception that frosh week really wasn't all that fun.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not at all surprised that this chant existed, or that it had been used for years.  What was surprising was the fact that it was still in use.

This is the sort of story that encourages news outlets to get the public's opinion. Normally I hate it when the news talks to the person on the street, or reads out tweets and e-mails on the topic.  But in this case, I think it is called for, as the disparity of public attitudes is the real issue here.  One tweet the CBC read on the air was from a person defending the students, saying, "You can’t sneeze without offending someone."

First of all, while I understand the basic point that it can be hard to avoid hurting anyone when some are quick to take offence, why is it that people with that viewpoint always seem to complain at the worst possible time?  Really, you feel inconvenienced by the idea of not making fun of raping the underaged?  That's really limiting your topics of conversation?

But that quote stuck out for me because it's a problem society is encountering in a lot of places.  If you're a geek, you're likely aware of controversies arising from behaviour at conventions dedicated to sci-fi, gaming, and technology.  There's an increasing number of women at these places, and suddenly behaviours that were once accepted are now frowned on, and the people asked to change feel hard done by.

We're going to have to accept that a more complex society will have more rules.  The more groups that are interacting with each other, the more likely we're going to offend one another.  Certainly there is a flip side, where groups will have to relax their impulse to be offended (hello, Muslim cartoon readers!)  But asking not to make light of rape is definitely in the category of legitimate offence, and if women are going to be equal partners in society, it's not asking too much to stay away from it.  If that's your equivalent of sneezing, then you're just going to have to find a good antihistamine.