May 25th, 2009, 2 Comments »
There were several of these handmade signs posted on telephone poles down the street from our house:
I assume it’s either some inside joke, or somebody’s a little off their rocker. In case you’re wondering, ‘thorobaaads’ is a Google whack.
May 11th, 2009, No Comments »
I’ve seen worse:
Surely there’s a book of these for non-punny pastors? Yep, this looks like a winner.
May 4th, 2009, No Comments »
Last year we did a bunch of work with DreamBank, a collaborative giving platform aimed at reducing waste and giving people gifts that they really want. Last week I wrote about Kickstarter, a way for creators to collecting funding for projects–a kind of collaborative investment in future art.
Today’s collaborative funding project (courtesy of Springwise) is GradeFund. From the article:
GradeFund lets students recruit sponsors—usually friends and family—who donate money for each good grade. Participating students upload their transcripts at the end of each term and GradeFund verifies them and then collects funds from the sponsors, who can set their own criteria such as sponsoring students from their alma mater or choosing specific grade levels to sponsor. They can determine donation amounts for each grade, from as low as USD 5.
It’s a nifty, if slightly warped, idea. Though I believe I benefited from such a scheme when I was in high school, I’m not a big fan of incentivizing childrens’ scholastic performance with cash.
The other factor that’s interesting in GradeFund’s case is that surely 100% of ’sponsors’ will be personally known to the student. That is, there’s no ‘fans’ or benevolent strangers funding the kid’s education. In this sense, the site is less essential than other collaborative funding projects I’ve seen. Surely the child’s family could just put a gradated score card up on the fridge and some money in a jar?
May 1st, 2009, 8 Comments »
In February, 2009, the Globe and Mail estimated that all levels of government had spent $1.4 billion dollars on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side since 2000. If the article is correct, that works out to $230K per person, in addition to what the government spends on the average citizen. Has there been progress? Not much, apparently. Anecdotally, the neighbourhood feels as (if not more) sketchy and broken as it did a decade ago.
I’m an advocate of radical solutions to the drug problem that’s at the heart of the Downtown East Side. I, for example, think we ought to give free heroin to drug addicts. I’m also a fan of decriminalization, so I was intrigued to read this report on Portugal’s 2001 decision to “abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine”:
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”
There are plenty of numbers in the article, but it makes a pretty compelling case. I’d also be curious about related crime trends, such as drug-related violence, robberies and so forth. I favour decriminalization (and free heroin for addicts) because it reduces or removes the economic incentives around selling and procuring illegal narcotics.
April 23rd, 2009, 1 Comment »
In the past few days, I’ve gotten news from sundry friends and longtime readers about projects, causes and sundry stuff they’re working on. I thought I’d pass it on:
April 16th, 2009, 4 Comments »
The Discovery Channel brought my lazy channel surfing the other day to a resounding halt. They were doing a story on the Shweeb (I still think that ought to be “Schweeb”), a human-powered monorail in New Zealand:
That’s a bit Minority Report, isn’t it? I suppose it would keep you dry riding to and from work in Vancouver winters–but how would you turn corners when you reached an intersection?
April 12th, 2009, 1 Comment »
I spotted this Reuters photo in the Globe and Mail last week. You can just hear our Prime Minister thinking, “now is when the humans raise their hands in successive groups. I, too, shall raise my hands, to cement the illusion that I am one of them.”
I was interested to learn that the origins of the wave are hotly debated.
UPDATE: I submitted this photo to Reddit, and was amused to read this (slightly paraphrased) exchange in the comments:
Redditer A: The lack of enthusiasm on his face makes this picture.
Redditer B: That is his enthusiastic face.
April 10th, 2009, 6 Comments »
Yesterday I was in Toronto and a dude in a suit and tie rolled by me on a long board. It got me thinking about how often I see men over the age of 25 riding a skateboard. I sometimes see them riding around with their young children, which is kind of charming.
That got me thinking about video games. I remember being kind of shocked to learn, a few years ago, that the average age of a gamer is now 33 years old. That is, that a significant majority of gamers has achieved the age of majority. Having grown up with video games, that shouldn’t surprise me (I still play them), but it does. I guess I always associated games with toys and play, and those were things that adults didn’t typically do.
Are there other ‘childish things’ that our generation exported into adulthood? Also, when I was young, video games and skateboards were mostly boy things. Are there analogous examples from the girls of the seventies and eighties?
April 6th, 2009, 3 Comments »
If you’re in university at the moment, and wanted to buy an essay, I was under the impression that the best you could do was to procure an off-the-shelf, pre-written one. As it turns out, you can order customized essays on any subject for US $19.99 to $42.99 a page:
In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.
It’s nice to know that, if everything else goes south, one could always make okay money writing somebody elses’s Psych 101 paper.
Incidentally, it’s this kind of journalism–long term projects that require a lot of dogged investigation and research–that’s most at risk with the downfall of newspapers.
March 23rd, 2009, 2 Comments »
Dale pointed me in the direction of this blog post that offers a rare insight into the sundry costs behind a major tech conference. DrupalCon is, I believe, the world’s biggest event celebrating all things Drupal. For the uninitiated, Drupal is a popular open source content management system that runs some of the world’s busiest websites (and may, in fact, be responsible for the world’s crop circles).
In the spirit of openness that pervades most open source products, the DrupalCon organizers have posted an ad hoc balance sheet for the conference. As somebody who’s organized a bunch of events (though none that big), they’re really interesting. DrupalCon had over 1400 attendees. Here are a few of the big numbers:
Revenue was more than a half million dollars at $542,350.
Our expenses came in at $356,569.31.
The Drupal community made a profit of $185,780.69 from DrupalCon DC…
Ticket sales for DrupalCon DC brought in $230,750.
Sponsorships of DrupalCon DC brought in $311,700.
I gather ticket prices were in the US $200 - 250 range. They had 54 sponsors who paid at least $2500 each.
Those are big numbers–the revenue and expenses are more than ten times that of Northern Voice or BarCamp Vancouver. I don’t have much to add, but I thought they’d be of interest to people who plan events.