Wet Coast Journals

Email Blues

Is email dying?

Two recent developments are leading me to wonder.

The first: David Schreck, author of the dogged, well-researched B.C. political website StrategicThoughts.com sent an email today to his email list announcing that - well - he'd be sending no more emails to the email list and that people would have to go to the website to view his columns, instead of having them hand-delivered in their email mailboxes as they came out.

Said David: "Bad addresses, spam filters and other hassles have made me eliminate the email service. It is too much trouble."

The second came in the form of a Register article, "People turn back on email 'cos of spam", which coincidentally, arrived in my inbox about half an hour after David's. According to the article, "The huge increase in email spam in recent years is beginning to take its toll on the online world. Some email users say they are using electronic mail less now because of spam."

In David's case, the problem isn't with spam; it's with the defences against spam that are blocking out legitimate emails, such as his.

I had an experience with a rogue spam filter a few weeks ago. An ad account rep at a local paper sent me an urgent email reminding me that my ad copy was due. Unfortunately, she put the word "ad" in the subject line; which caused the spam filter to throw the message away. I never received it. Luckily the sales rep took the initiative to phone me a few days later to ask why I hadn't responded to her email.

So, you can't trust email to get through. (This is besides the long-standing caveat that just because someone has an email address, there is no guarantee that 1., that address is legitimate/active; 2., they read their email in a timely fashion or 3. that they're not on vacation or sick or their computer or network isn't broken down.

Another factor that is rendering email increasingly non-useful is the tendency for some people to mark all their email urgent. More and more emails are popping up in my inbox with that annoying "!" beside them. To coin a phrase, if everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. If all the emails in my inbox are marked urgent, then which one do I answer first? There's one there right now, flashing its annoying "urgent" status at me. I'm going to ignore it. I would have opened it except for that damn exclamation mark.

Build it and they will come

The second-year students at Simon Fraser University's Surrey campus have found a new use for the campus's electronic events calendar - they're using it to let the administration know how they feel about certain courses.

The events calendar was set up in Movable Type, which has a default of allowing comments for postings. That default was not turned off for the events calendar, even though you wouldn't think you'd get too many comments about coming events.

Wrong. The calendar had been operating for about a month and a half when all of a sudden the comments started coming. They came in response to a posting about a meeting that the Surrey program director would be holding on Oct. 24 with students. So far, 12 comments have been posted (13 actually, but one of them was a rogue scurrilous flame that was removed).

It's been fascinating to watch. The comments (mostly about two courses) are polite, well-reasoned, and constructive. But they're also firm. The students believe there are problems with these two courses and this is their way of letting the administration know about those problems.

Oh yes, the students have their own discussion boards on a different website, but they know that the senior administration never goes to that particular site; whereas the surrey.sfu.ca site is the administration site and by posting their remarks - in response to a calendar listing, they stand a chance of having their voices heard.

This is what I find so fascinating about technology - the way it's used in unexpected ways.

Joe McCarthy is Alive and Well and Living at City Hall

An acquaintance of mine, Celine Mauboules, has suddenly, unwillingly, found herself thrust into the public eye.

Celine's crimes are that she's a member of COPE, a former researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a newly hired planner with the City of Vancouver.

For NPA hyena Sam Sullivan, this won't do. It's obviously a political appointment, he thunders, despite the fact that she was hired through due process at a staff level. He raises a fuss, the NPA-favouring media picks up on it, and poor Celine, who thought she was hired to deal with social housing issues, suddenly finds herself in the spotlight.

I know Celine through her volunteer work as a board member of the Mole Hill Community Housing Society. She's an intelligent, hard worker who devotes a great deal of time to social and housing issues.

She's handled the tempest quite well, and has maintained her sense of humour. But it shouldn't have happened. Has the NPA stooped so low that it has to resort to Joe McCarthy-style mudslinging? What's next? A purge of City Hall to ferret out anyone who belongs to COPE?

Perhaps (and I'm being optimistic here) it's an indication of how powerless Sullivan and his crony Peter Ladner actually are, that they feel it necessary to pick on mid-level civil servants.

Emergence

I've just finished reading "Emergence" by Steven Johnson. A fascinating, thought-provoking book. I can't begin to do justice to his argument, but perhaps I can entice others to discover the book for themselves (he also has a website, www.stevenberlinjohnson.com".

Johnson's argument is that much of what goes on in nature and in society is driven by individuals acting in groups. These individuals may be ants, or neurons, or humans, but they are usually not aware of the group's actions, they only know their own individual actions. Ant colonies, he says, are not ruled by queens; they are ruled by the actions of the individual ants which are in turn reacting to a few simple stimuli. All the ants acting together create a powerful, functional colony, but the individual ants don't know this.

Neurons function the same way. A neuron in your brain isn't intelligent; but the actions of all the billions of neurons create intelligence. An individual neuron is of course, not aware of this.

Johnson extends the argument to cities. Communities in cities are created by the interaction of the individuals who live and work there. In the right circumstances, a community develops - it often isn't planned, but it does develop and it thrives, sometimes for centuries.

He then carries his argument to the world wide web where he says the circumstances don't exist to create a higher order out of the individual websites that make up the web (a lack of feedback, for one thing.)

A fascinating book, and one that shows both the robustness and fragility of communities.

Interesting, reading some of the comments on this book at allconsuming.net, a site that tracks what people in the weblog community are reading. A number of these people have seized upon Emergence as proof that the blogging community has created a higher order of intelligence - the so-called "blogosphere".

Well, I'm sorry, but it just isn't so. Webloggers like these, who spend most of their time talking to one another about blogging remind me of the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages (though not as educated as those theologians). They are so concerned with the tool - the blog - that they ignore what it's used for - communicating - and instead obsess over the smallest trivia about blogging and blogging tools, ignoring the glorious real messy world out there. They're not creating a higher intelligence; they're shouting at one another in an empty room.

But don't mind them. Pick up a copy of Emergence and enjoy a well-written, intelligent, different way of looking at the world.

Nelson Park and the Homeless

All of a sudden, the issue of Nelson Park has come to a boil.

Nelson Park is the largest piece of green space in the West End (not counting Stanley Park), but it's always seemed somewhat unsatisfactory. Yes, people use it, but not as much as it could be used, and the uses to which it is put are limited. Dog owners use it to walk their dogs, street people and ESL students use it to sell stuff, drug users use it to shoot up at night, the homeless use it as a place to rest, for an hour or two, or for the night, unless they're moved on by the police. And that's about it.

The park is in definite need of a makeover; something to make it more appealing to a broader range of users. And it seemed as if the Parks Board agreed. They had a budget to remake Nelson Park.

But it looked like they would be pre-empted. Perhaps as part of the general backlash against the homeless, against drug dealers and drug users (all three lumped together by the backlashers), there has suddenly arisen a cry that something be done about Nelson Park. A petition was started demanding that vagrants, and loiterers and drug users be removed from the park (the author of the petition couldn't even spell the name of the chair of the Parks Board correctly, even though he had once been a Parks Board commissioner himself).

Luckily, more sensible voices made themselves heard, namely those of members of the West End Residents Association, who called for a task force to obtain input from a broad range of voices from the West End. (See the extended entry for a copy of WERA's letter.) The school board and the parks board (which have joint responsibility for Nelson Park) seem agreeable. We shall see.

The person who suggested the task force signs her emails with the saying ""Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, its the only thing that has."- Margaret Mead". She's right. She's proved it.

Parks Commissioners, Vancouver Parks Board
Trustees, Vancouver School Board

October 6, 2003

Re: Nelson Park

Nelson Park has been the subject of considerable debate lately, as various groups and individuals voice their concerns about the park and make suggestions for its future. The West End Residents Association proposes that the Vancouver Parks Board and the Vancouver School Board establish a task force on the future of Nelson Park.

This park is important to the West End. It is the largest piece of green space in our neighbourhood (Stanley Park, on the edge of the West End, cannot really be considered a West End park – it is a park of city-wide, indeed, national significance, not a community park). Nelson Park is adjacent to a school the Mole Hill Community Housing project, the Mole Hill Child Care Centre, the Doctor Peter Centre and to private residences. It is used for a diversity of purposes by a variety of individuals of all elements of West End society.

Because of this diversity of users, the West End Residents Association believes that the future of the park should be determined through as wide a consultation as possible. We feel that the current debate over Nelson Park provides an opportunity for the West End community to come up with a vision for a park that will accommodate all its diverse users. That is why we feel that a task force, comprised of representatives of the various interested groups, would be best suited to draft recommendations for the future of Nelson Park and to propose a vision for a park that all West End residents can enjoy and be proud of.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely

West End Residents Association

Thurlow Street - Our Response

The West End Residents Association sent off the following response to the City today about Thurlow Street:

Although we all agree that the visual impact of having 2 intersections south of Davie "bulged", would have an immediate "visual" impact to drivers and obviously increase the safety factor and ease for pedestrians to cross the street, we are still of the mind that it‚s important to do something north of Nelson. The area you have chosen still has the least amount of vehicle and pedestrian traffic. Speed on Thurlow is a problem all along the street as -- depending on the time of day and the amount of traffic -- cars, delivery trucks and buses speed when it‚s a clear way in front of them and the lights are in their favour.

We feel that a plan should be drawn up for all of Thurlow so that the city can budget money each and every year towards improvements. This would reassure the public that the city is sincere in its desire to put pedestrians first. It would also aid in the continuity of the design for Thurlow.

One of the recommendations we have that should be included in the overall plan is that the intersection at Harwood has both bulges and an island boulevard. This would give a visual cue no driver could ignore, slow speed as they crest the hill and prevent through traffic for Harwood street at the same time (of course the small triangle/island would have to be removed to allow for traffic to turn around the bulges).

We were a bit puzzled, Doug, when you said that traffic is prevented from parking on Thurlow between Smithe and Nelson only at rush hour as we have never seen cars parked there. Sure enough the signs say "no stopping at any time". An immediate change should be signs allowing for parking during non rush hour times. This, however, would just be for the interim as we strongly feel that the 3 lanes should be reduced to 2 lanes on a 24 hour basis.

We don't think you have taken into account that the dedicated turning lane on Thurlow is turning on to another one way, allowing for a constant flow of turning traffic. This lane never backs up as cars can and do turn on a red signal. We invite you to view this intersection at rush hour and see for yourself how rarely the turn lane exceeds three cars. More importantly, by moving the lane over, drivers can more easily see pedestrians crossing the street. Pedestrians need to be more visible especially when crossing from the NE corner to the SE corner where they have their backs to turning traffic. We need to make the pedestrians more visible. Most pedestrian accidents occur where there are high volumes of traffic and this corner warrants better protection.

Also, please don't forget that an integral part of the plan must include the restoration of the treed boulevards. It was a travesty they were removed in the first place. (The plan at one time was to remove all the treed boulevards in the West End to widen streets and facilitate traffic and was strongly protested against by the then West End community.)

Lastly, as you saw, Brigid, that day with the taxi, cars are under the impression that unmarked intersections are vehicle right of ways. It is the feeling of this group that the city's policy of marking only some intersections with crosswalks, has made the unmarked intersections more dangerous. All intersections should be marked.

These, of course, are all ideas and recommendations and do not preclude any changes that might be made as we continue to discuss and gather more information about Thurlow St.

Privacy versus Safety

The front page story in the Vancouver Sun today is about how bar owners in the city are thinking of checking patrons' identification as they enter the door ("High-tech targets bad bar customers".) The headline sounds innocuous enough and deserving of community support. After all, who wouldn't be against bad bar customers being targetted?

But it's the subhead that's scary - "All patrons face personal history check at the door".

Apparently, as soon as you enter the bar, you will have to show your driver's license (and if you don't have a driver's license, what then?) and your information will be fed into a machine that will show if someone with your name and address is a bad guy.

One bar owner is quoted as saying that most people would accept a slight lessening of privacy in exchange for increased safety. He goes on to compare it to being asked to show a driver's license when renting a car.

Well, there's a difference. You show a driver's license when renting a car because you need to have a valid driver's license in order to drive a car. You don't need a driver's license in order to drink.

Why stop here? If people will feel a little bit safer if asked to identify themselves when entering a bar, why not restaurants as well? or supermarkets? Or public libraries? The technology is available, and we all want to be safe.

Don't we?

You won't find me patronizing Vancouver bars anymore.

A Walk Down Thurlow Street

Thurlow Street, as West End residents know, is a bit of an anomaly. It's a major thoroughfare for both motor vehicles (cars, SUVs, trucks, buses) and pedestrians (not so much cyclists - too dangerous). At the same time, it's a residential street, with both detached home, strata buildings and apartments. It also serves as the border of Nelson Park.

The West End Residents Association has been concerned about Thurlow for a long time. It's noisy, because of the traffic, and it's dangerous for the pedestrians. Many of the crossings are inadequate and the sidewalks are narrow in many places. Traffic moves at a frightening speed, and crossing the street, especially at Barclay going east and west and at Nelson going north and south, can be a real challenge.

Thus we were pleased to learn the City had plans to "improve" Thurlow with traffic calming measures, such as corner bulges. And, even better, the city planners were interested in meeting with us and hearing our suggestions.

We took them seriously. We met beforehand and walked up and down Thurlow, making observations as to traffic flow and pedestrian traffic. We talked to people on the street. We made notes. And then we met with the City staff and presented our views - traffic bulges at Robson, Haro, Barclay, Nelson and Harwood. An advanced walk signal for pedestrians at Thurlow and Haro. Removing a lane at Thurlow and Nelson.

The city reps listened politely, and asked questions, and thentold us why our suggestions would not work. Time and again our proposals were vetoed because they would delay drivers!

What a difference from say Copenhagen, where if a measure would help pedestrians and delay drivers it would be enthusiastically adopted; the theory being that some of the inconvenienced drivers would leave their vehicles at home next time and walk, ride their bikes or take transit. No, in Vancouver, where supposedly pedestrians come first, no inconvenience to the motorist can be even contemplated, even if it increases pedestrian safety.

The city staffers then explained their proposal, which would be to make all the improvements south of Davie, which has the least amount of either pedestrian or motor vehicle traffic. Granted, improvements are needed here (because of the width of the road, the limited visibility as motorists come over the crest of the hill and the speed at which they drive), but as far as we could see, the main reason for concentrating the improvements here was that there were fewer motorists to inconvenience on this stretch of the road.

However, they did agree to walk with us down the street and they were able to witness firsthand the travails suffered by pedestrians on this street. They made no promises, but they haven't flatly rejected our proposals either.

Who's the Real Menace?

Part of the platform for the Lorne Mayencourt-inspired WECAN (West End Citizens Action Network) is to "clean up" the West End of "undesirables" such as drug pushers and the homeless. They claim that the homeless harass and frighten people when they ask for money and are a menace.

Well, this afternoon, as I was walking up Burrard Street, a street person suddenly rushed out and asked if I had any spare change. I told him (truthfully) that I didn't. He then said "I've never seen you around here? Are you a tourist?" "No, I live in the West End," I replied. "In that case," he said, "have a good day, neighbour!" to which I replied, "You too!" and stepped off the sidewalk to cross the laneway.

As soon as I did so an SUV driven by a respectable-looking middle-aged white guy came rushing towards me, making a left-hand turn across three lanes of traffic on Burrard in an effort to cut through the laneway. It came to a screeching halt inches away from me and the driver glared and honked his horn at me.

So, who was the real menace?