[N.B. This is a draft of an assignment submitted for DPI-685: 2020 Vision and Information Policy: Considering the Public Interest. Like my last assignment, the purpose of the assignment was to have us develop a utopian or distopian scenario about some aspect of the future at the conclusion of the next decade. This time I had to write a utopian scenario. I chose to write about American democracy, and while it ultimately is a utopian story, it's again the result of change precipitated by crisis. Note that this is necessarily fiction. Any resemblance to situations or people living or dead is purely coincidental. IANAL. I'm also not fully up on my American politics or history—caveat lector.]

31 December 2020

Remember, remember the 6th of November. November 6, 2012, that is. A date that was regarded with both disdain and, later, some grudging appreciation this past decade. For while there was no conspiracy, this near miss shook up the government and finally precipitated changes that had been a long time coming in American democracy.

If you haven’t already figured it out, November 6, 2012 was the first presidential election of the decade, and the first real test of the public’s reaction to Barack Obama’s tumultuous first term. “Hope”, “change”, and “Yes we can!” were distant memories, and while some important and necessary changes occurred in that first term, four years certainly wasn’t enough time to right the woes of the nation. Health care, climate change, and financial industry reform were all successfully pushed through the Congress in one form or another, with various claims of efficacy and appropriate process from both sides as the partisan divide deepened. Arguably victories for Democrats, the metrics by which the public assess the government—”the economy”, jobs, taxes, commodity prices, and entitlement programs—left the average voter in want of more.

Unfortunately for voters, it wasn’t clear what options they had if they wanted “more” or wanted change. Obama/Biden was of course the Democratic ticket, with Petraeus/Jindal offered up after the Republican primary season. While this certainly was a departure from the 2008 Republican ticket and a more credible offering by the GOP, it was still “politics as usual” to most. Both parties’ campaign machines were running flat out. Further complicating things was the advent of direct corporate speech in the wake of 2010′s Citizens’ United decision. While major corporations were still unsure about directly wading into political discourse, other groups including unions and non-profits joined the fray. Things would get more interesting still.

For the first time since Ross Perot, a third party with some reasonable support and national presence emerged, and that was none other than the Tea Party movement. Taking a populist strategy and appealing to frustrations of the working class with regard to job creation, taxation, and government intervention, the party organized itself from a protest movement into a registered political party. While fielding candidates for the House in several states, their major effort was the presidential campaign. Specifically, the strategy was to, ideally, install a “true patriot” in the Office of the President, but more realistically to influence the debate and promises of presidential candidates while criticizing “business as usual” politics that some Americans felt increasingly disconnected from. Such an effort would require a different brand of politician and a well-funded set of backers, given the billion dollar enterprise that the presidential election campaign had become.

The Tea Party was swinging for the fences with their ticket. In February, Sarah Palin announced her intention to run for presidential candidate of the Tea Party, and was acclaimed at their convention in June. Shortly after, it was announced that Glenn Beck would be the Vice Presidential candidate and her running mate, and that the party would be receiving significant support from Fox News. As outlandish as this all seemed, it had some traction, especially amongst those frustrated with the state of the American economy and political landscape. Others viewed this as the icing on the farcial cake of American politics, and withdrew out of frustration.

As the campaigns marched on towards November 6, the Tea Party gambit was paying some dividends. Democrats and Republicans were roughly tied and focusing most of their efforts on the Dem-GOP battle, offering mainly disparaging remarks to the Tea Party’s efforts. Sympathetic media coverage and the treatment from the two major parties turned the Tea Party into a sort of populist underdog, capturing the attention of many Americans who felt betrayed by “the system”. In contrast to the comparatively similar Democrat and Republican platforms, the Tea Party proposed relatively radical changes that would bring America back to what they claimed were its true core values.

As the ballot returns trickled in on the evening of November 6, it started to become clear that this election was shaping up to be anything but normal. In retrospect, the collective frustration and apathy of a nation led to the lowest presidential voter turnouts ever: 42%. Even more strange for those covering the election was that the Tea Party was taking Electoral College votes: 34 in total (from Alaska, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, part of Nebraska, Idaho, Arkansas, and New Mexico). This left 504 electors to be divided amongst the major parties, with the split going 259 for Obama and 245 for Petraeus. With neither party holding a majority of votes, the 12th amendment was invoked for the first time in modern political history and the House was called upon to elect the president.

When the House reconvened in January, the Democrats, having a slight majority going into the election, were preparing to elect president Obama into office for his second term. However, the election of some Tea Party representatives further complicated this process, with neither major party holding a majority in the house. In other words, a coalition between the Tea Partiers and one of the major parties was necessary to secure the Presidency. Both parties knew this and had been negotiating, but ultimately the Republicans made the better “corrupt bargain” to secure the Presidency in exchange for some policy compromises. The public was confused and unhappy about this unexpected turn of events, and the Democrats were outraged, playing up the “undemocratic” nature of the appointment of the commander-in-chief.

Recognizing the “unpleasant” populist volatility that the Tea Party had brought to the House and the election, and the public outcry about the Republican ascendance into office, the first act of President Petraeus was one of both short-term and long-term self-preservation: he insisted the house “offer an olive branch across the aisle” and through a true allied effort, develop a bipartisan bill to address the problems that led up to the dysfunctional 2012 election. Through the horse trading necessary to achieve passage, a number of proposed changes and reforms that had been waiting in the wings for a politically opportune time were finally enacted. In October the President signed the Improving and Championing Effective Democracy by Transforming and Educating America Act, or the ICEDTEA Act.

ICEDTEA took on a number of issues that were either believed to be part of the cause of the dismal 2012 election, or had been introduced as part of the nearly-complete reconsideration of the federal democratic process. Broadly, the issues included voter engagement, education, media reform, and electoral reform.
Some of the changes were implemented right away when the legislation passed. Specifically in terms of voter engagement, the act made Election Day a statutory holiday to enable and encourage all Americans to vote. Further, to incentivize participation and parties taking action to get out the vote, election financing laws were changed to reimburse party electoral expenses according to the number of votes they receive, by approximately $5 per vote, to be spent on goods and services made in the United States.

Following on this voter incentive approach, more sweeping campaign finance reform measures were also implemented. Recognizing the need for fairer elections in light of Citizens United and the Tea Party’s affiliation with Fox News, a public campaign financing system was advanced that would afford legitimate parties generous election financing with the agreement not to accept private donations. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, both parties agreed to the public option for the 2016 election.

While ICEDTEA didn’t involve constitutional amendments, it used other means to take action against the Citizens United decision ICEDTEA required much more explicit disclosure of the funding sources for non-PAC campaign materials, and that disclosure needed approval by the owners of the funding organization, including shareholders. Print and television advertising materials were required to be preceded by a warning not unlike the Surgeon General’s note on cigarettes, informing the reader or viewer of the organizations that “approved this message”, leaving less doubt about where the speech really came from.

The drafters of ICEDTEA had vision beyond these “quick fixes” too. They realized that the root of problems that had been gnawing at American democracy needed structural and longer-term solutions, and those efforts of the ICEDTEA were focused on education and media reform. As with many initiatives of the federal government, money was needed to provide the incentives necessary to enact changes voluntarily that they were otherwise prohibited of enacting by law.

Education reforms were relatively modest, consisting of a subsidy to offer federal civics education for junior high and high school students. This was to include funding for a national newspaper subscription for each high school student, and time set aside each day for discussion of current events. In election years, students were also to be given a minor credit for voting in their first election.

Structural media reform under ICEDTEA was more extensive, given the collapse and consolidation of print media during the 2011 recession that was blamed in part for the lack of diverse voices and poor civic engagement that prevailed in the 2012 election. First, a new class of organization was created solely to allow print news organizations to act as private, tax-exempt non-profits if they limited their advertising to well under half of their publication. This new option enabled smaller, subscriber-driven publications to emerge from the ashes of the print media recession. The Corporation for Public Civic Media was also established, in the style of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to provide grants and other sources of funding for smaller and local news organizations. To spur innovation in the news market, in hopes that better news experiences or new business models might be developed, the CPCM also established several prize competitions, much like the Knight Foundation’s work, to foster innovation in areas such as web print news, mobile news, citizen journalism, and investigative reporting. Finally, moderate ‘net neutrality’ provisions were codified in a new title of the Telecommunications Act that specifically addressed consumer broadband Internet as a means for citizen education and participation in democratic government. This allayed the fears of small news organizations that large, vertically integrated content-provider companies might discriminate against other news sources in favor of their own.

Given the structural nature of a number of the changes implemented as part of the ICEDTEA Act, not all of the improvements were visible immediately. In addition to the changes to voting laws and campaign finance notices that voters first experienced during the 2014 midterm elections, there was a resurgence of small media organizations covering local and national politics. Financed though a micropayment system developed by a startup supported by the CPCM, these sites were financially independent and free to cover the news as they chose, for delivery on a multitude of electronic devices.

The real changes became visible from 2016 and onward. The 2016 election was the first presidential election since ICEDTEA had been enacted, and it saw increased public interest and participation that broke the downward slide in voter turnout. The campaign finance changes limited corporate speech as was hoped, while the public financing offer was accepted by both major parties. The public financing option even allowed the Green Party to run a serious campaign as public attention turned to the growing problems of climate change with the increasingly unusual weather that the US was experiencing. Despite partisan differences and the political game, citizens were reaffirming some of their faith in the political system.

Last month we had our second full election since ICEDTEA, and the shift away from our previously dysfunctional system is really starting to show. First-time voters are up to 29% of the total registered voters, including 80% of the 18-25 age group. All major parties again participated in the public campaign finance scheme, with fierce oversight of the financing records and campaign activities by citizen journalists and the robust civic media outlets. Voter turnout came in at 71% of eligible voters, of which a majority soundly elected a female Republican candidate—not Sarah Palin.

While America’s politics still leave something to be desired, November 6, 2012 was the turning point of a long run of political decay. The change precipitated by the crisis significantly improved democracy in the United States and brought with it a whole host of other positive changes for American civic engagement, necessitated by the near-breakdown of the two-party system. Remember, remember, the 6th of November.

[N.B. This was an assignment submitted for DPI-685: 2020 Vision and Information Policy: Considering the Public Interest. The purpose of the assignment was to have us develop a utopian or distopian scenario about some aspect of the future at the conclusion of the next decade. Perhaps not surprisingly, I decided to write about the future of the Internet. I wasn't sure what else to do with it, so here it is world! Note that this is necessarily fiction (and is also a distopian future from my perspective), though it contains many grains of (unreferenced) truth.]

31 December 2020

If you would have asked me a decade ago what I would have thought the Internet would be like today, I would have been hard-pressed to give you an answer that was not filled with complete uncertainty. How can one predict the future of such an “organic” thing, especially since the previous two decades saw tremendous and unexpected growth in this medium? Yet there was one thing I had always taken for granted—always assumed would be part of the core values of the Internet: freedom and openness. What this meant to me was the freedom to connect, to send messages and publish whatever you pleased, and to participate in this arguably democratic medium. It was a true marketplace for ideas! There certainly were some limits on this freedom, from domestic law and the like, but they were relatively reasonable, and if necessary, it was relatively easy to be anonymous on the Internet.

I think we all expected this seemingly unshakable character of the Internet to endure well into the future, as it had already weathered the challenges of significant growth and the involvement of extremely varied political, ideological, and business interests. An artifact of being designed by academics in the United States, the Internet was founded on design assumptions and an ethos that carried openness and freedom with it as it grew. But what would happen if these features were used to attack the land that gave birth to this medium?

From the 1990s through to 2010, the Internet evolved significantly, moving from an academic curiosity, to a common information medium, and finally to a ubiquitous and required part of the daily lives of many in the developed world. The growing importance of the Internet, and its economic and national security significance, was also dawning on national governments. As ISPs and other major Internet-based companies were already giving significant attention to network security for their own businesses, governments were realizing that a security strategy was required at a national level to counter possible threats. While governments were still thinking about the first steps in working towards a viable cybersecurity program, the unthinkable happened: a massive Internet-based terror attack was launched against the United States during the midst of its presidential election campaign in August 2012.

The attack was sophisticated and multi-faceted, utilizing a combination of targeted attacks against specific targets and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to flood US networks with high amounts of traffic to hide the attack. The targeted attacks were executed using stolen credentials and accumulated knowledge collected by software that exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities in major operating systems. This flood of traffic also served to delay communication, and news gathering and dissemination, causing uncertainty and panic amongst the American public.

A number of firms trading in US stock markets were hit first, when attackers executed a growing series of low-volume trades that significantly depressed the share price of many major US companies. The markets were eventually closed as traders noticed increasingly strange behavior and realized they were not in control. Over the course of several days as recovery and analysis was taking place, a number of the trades were cancelled, but it was difficult and controversial to differentiate between attacker-initiated and legitimate trades. This significant downtime for the market and the vulnerability of the firms involved caused short-term economic damage, and long term concerns in confidence of these entities.

Nearly simultaneously, the databases of several major logistics and shipping companies were corrupted, preventing further transportation or deliveries of everything from packages to medical supplies and fresh food from taking place. Again, recovery was possible over the course of several days as databases were rebuilt from backups and low-tech attempts to route some of the goods sitting on the ground took place. However, delayed and spoiled goods resulted in losses on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, in addition to the shock and confidence issues that this attack raised.

Soon after the first two attacks, several electric energy utilities in Texas that had energy control systems connected to their corporate networks were exploited. Attackers used these systems to cause several intentional faults that severely damaged a major generating station near Dallas and shut down a number of other stations throughout the state, causing a collapse of the power system for between 24 hours and several days in certain areas. The outage leading to food spoilage, major discomfort, and a number of deaths as air conditioning failed in the over-100°F heat.

Even after the events that initiated the physical world damages were over, the multitude of compromised machines continued to DDoS the networks, preventing telephone calls and news from reaching citizens through “modern” channels. Resolution of the problem only began several hours later in the day when an executive order was issued by the president to require ISPs disconnect consumer machines from the Internet until an interim solution could be found.

As could have been expected, the turmoil that resulted became a major issue in the presidential election, with campaign promises to regulate or tame the Internet coming from both parties. There was also much talk of holding those responsible for the attack accountable using all means available to the United States. However, determining responsibility proved to be difficult. Forensic analysis showed that the attacks seemed to originate from home users’ PCs on US soil, but it was quickly determined that these users did not have the capabilities to mount such an attack, and that these machines were only used as a staging ground for the attackers.

Some began pointing fingers at China and others, but the lack of evidence made this position untenable. However, the attacks did enable other responses. Similar to post-September 11 politics, the attacks cultivated the political will both domestically and internationally to make the Internet a far more accountable environment to dissuade future attacks out of fear of retaliation using legal, economic, or military force.

The “open” nature of the Internet and its historic ethos and roots were cited as the major enabling factors for these attacks. The expectation of opportunity to revamp many of the fundamental principles of the Internet brought together many strange bedfellows. IP rightsholders became advocates of stronger identity and accountability systems to enable better enforce their rights on the Internet. Similarly, some international governments and other institutions that had been pushing for multilateral governmental control over the Internet used this crisis to motivate the centralization of control over Internet addresses and names with the ITU.

The first changes began internationally, where it was declared by the ITU with the support of most of its member states that the time of the Internet’s self-governance was over. Coordinated Internet resources would now be centralized and controlled under the ITU, and partitioned along national lines to ensure each nation’s responsibility for its Internet activity. Internet protocol developers also worked hastily to consider technical approaches to making Internet users accountable for their actions. However, the most dramatic changes occurred domestically with coordination amongst key US partners.

In the wake of the 2012 attacks and a relatively locked-down Internet strategy developed hastily in response, the newly inaugurated President and Congress began on the task of taming the Internet. Their goals were to ensure that such attacks were not allowed to happen again, and to develop a stronger, more accountable internet that would allow its use to continue with confidence, particularly for commerce. The plan involved three components: 1) stronger regulation of “critical” Internet infrastructure, 2) liability regimes that hold internet users and their providers liable for the use of their internet connectivity to commit computer crime or other disruptive acts, and 3) the requirement for strong identity guarantees for users and providers to allow liability to be associated with a legal person. The intent was to make these requirements necessary for any company offering Internet service, and pressure was placed on US allies to take similar changes to ensure connectivity to US networks and consumers.

As this tumultuous decade comes to a close, we have an Internet, or rather internets, that I certainly could not have foreseen a decade ago. What is now known as the Internet is still our primary global information network, and still owned and operated by private sector telecommunication companies, but is much more heavily regulated by governments to ensure critical infrastructure is properly managed. The new liability regimes established under the 6-year-old Internet title of the Telecommunications Act mandate that individual responsibility is now a key component of all Internet transactions, and require users to be positively identified before connection takes place. Identity is also much stronger, and while the idea of the Government as a national identity provider for “internet drivers licenses” proved to be politically unpalatable, a cartel of tightly regulated private identity providers provides a similar service that allows internet users to positively identify themselves to others on the internet.

Those key values I alluded to before—freedom and openness—were sacrificed in the name of security after the 2012 network terror attacks. While free speech is of course still permitted on the Internet under the First Amendment, there has been an notable reduction in what used to be fairly careless discussion in internet forums—arguably a chilling effect from individual self-censorship out of greater awareness of ones identity being associated with their speech on the Internet. The structure of the Internet industry has also changed greatly. Regulatory compliance costs and other headaches of the reactive legislation have made it extremely challenging to operate an ISP, driving small players out of the market and encouraging consolidation, with AT&T-Verizon and Com3 (a merger of Comcast and Level3) dividing the market roughly evenly. Finally, innovation has suffered as consumers adopted iPhones, iSlates, Kindles, and other devices that provide strong security guarantees in order to limit exposure to worms and viruses that could expose them to liability. The approval process in place at Apple and Google has grown more stringent and expensive as a result, ending the days of creating applications in your spare time.

I used the expression “internets” above because the dramatic shift in the culture of the Internet was not accepted by everyone, leading to the creation of a second, parallel internet. Known colloquially as the “undernet”, this network bears much stronger resemblance to the Internet of 2010 and decades previous. Freedom, openness, and anonymity are still present, and so the Undernet has become the forum for many of the vices and other activities of the former Internet where users were concerned about revealing their identities. However, universal Undernet accessibility is difficult. The Undernet may not be connected to the Internet, due to both legal prohibition and technical incompatibility. It is also not popular amongst corporations and most other large organizations subject to government regulation, leading to an absence of commercial ISPs providing connectivity. Instead, it is mainly accessed wirelessly through community networks, and a few ISPs who have partitioned their networks to provide both Internet and Undernet service because they believe in the ideals of the Undernet. The Undernet has also become the primary network of countries that have refused to agree to the new Internet Protocol and the strong regulatory, accountability, and identity requirements it demanded. This partitioning of the formerly global Internet fell mainly along economic partnership and trade lines, with strong US allies adopting the system either universally, like Canada, or at least partly in parallel with the Undernet, like China.

While this may seem like a dystopian future when considered from the ideals of a 2010 Internet, not all of the effects of regulating and partitioning the Internet have been bad. The Internet is now a very trustworthy place, allowing enforceable contracts to be executed electronically and enabling greater electronic commerce. Computer crime and abuse has also largely disappeared, due in part to the accountability provided by strong identity, and also due to consumer popularity of safe computing devices like the Apple iPhone and iSlate or Amazon Kindle that only allow vetted software to run. And while it is certainly less common for whistle-blowers and others desiring anonymity to contact journalists or post information on the Internet, the Undernet has taken up this mantle.

Ultimately, though, we have had to make a significant trade for this newly secure Internet. In spite of the benefits of one global network, we established a new digital divide that once again falls along familiar geopolitical and economic lines. While I have hope that eventually we will reestablish a global network with extents similar to the reach of the former Internet, I cannot help longing for the earlier days of the Internet, one global Internet, that for three decades gave us a truly accessible marketplace for ideas.

When Charles M. Vest, then provost of the University of Michigan, was offered the job of president of MIT in 1990, he met with Wiesner, who also had come to MIT from the University of Michigan. Wiesner, in ten words of concise persuasion, cited three worries of university presidents that Vest would not have at MIT — “No big time athletics. No medical school. No honorary degrees.”

When I first received this, I wasn’t going to mention anything online as I thought it might seem pretentious. Perhaps it still does seem pretentious, but:

1) This is too exciting not to mention, and

2) This is probably the easiest way to let everyone who is interested know.

So that’s all for now. The next big thing will be finding a research assistantship to cover tuition and living expenses, but I’m quite hopeful that I will be able to find something suitable. And then I will be in Boston next fall.

I appreciate that the role played by RRC and other post-secondary education and training institutions is very important to Manitoba, but this analysis is focused on my area of familiarity — university.

Liberal (source)

• Eliminate the tuition freeze and limit total cost-of-education increases to inflation
• Increased baseline funding for PSE
• Grants and bursaries for students staying in Manitoba
• Bursary fund to allow qualified students without the ability to pay to attend university
• Increased R&D investment
• Quicker accreditation for foreign-trained professionals (like the U of M IEEQ program)
• Free transit passes for students

Although there is a considerable lack of detail and hard numbers here, I’m impressed. It must have taken a lot of guts to announce an elimination of the tuition freeze tradition in our province (albeit while limiting increases to the inflation rate), a province where 82% of Manitobans support lower tuition (note that the consequences of such a position, including issues of quality as well as where additional funding comes from, are not of concern to these pollsters).

Increased funding is also always good and sorely needed. No numbers, unfortunately. Need-based bursaries are also good, and together with the lack of freeze dispense government funding based on lack ability to pay — arguably a more socially equalizing approach than the universal, equally distributed freeze we currently have.

Increased R&D investment should benefit both academics and students while providing further incentives for businesses to set up shop or continue investing in their Manitoba operations. Businesses and immigrants would also benefit with support of fast-tracked accreditation programs like IEEQ.

Finally, free transit passes. There are numerous benefits here — a tangible promise, more money in students’ pockets, a more sustainable transportation option for up to 30-40,000 Winnipeggers, potential for less student drunk driving, and no cost to the government for all the students who don’t ride the bus — an unfortunate but common trend.

Bottom line: All in all, a lot of good ideas — potential solutions for some of the problems facing our universities. They need to be fleshed out, but I doubt that Manitoba’s public will ever give Dr. Gerrard the chance to do so.

NDP (source)
(Forgive me if I missed an announcement, but this is all I was able to find)

• a 60% tuition rebate for new grads who stay here
• extending the tuition freeze

There have been plenty of other NDP announcements regarding programs and projects for RRC, training and apprenticeship programs, but this seems to be all that’s out there for universities.

Nothing new at all here, perhaps because the NDP would like you to think that universities are doing just fine. The tuition freeze, currently in its 7th year, is starving the province’s universities while not dramatically improving accessibility, it’s intended purpose, as noted in the Winnipeg Free Press earlier this year.

As for the up to 60% tax credit on tuition, let me join the other young Manitobans who say “a tax credit won’t keep me here”, even if it were 100%. My education was so cheap in the first place that I wouldn’t think twice about leaving MB for a great job elsewhere. $12,000 in tax credits is hard to compare to a city or province that provides a satisfying place to work and live (or an NHL team — just kidding).

Bottom line: Nothing to see here that we haven’t already seen — move along. Shouldn’t you be worried about health care?

PC (source)

• Strike a taskforce to examine the investments and reforms required to make Manitoba’s PSE institutions stronger and better able to compete, including funding and governance models
• Double the Manitoba Scholarship and Bursary program funding to $10M/year
• Allow professional and graduate faculties (and all faculties) to raise tuition with the support of a student referendum

I actually had the good fortune to see this announcement in person, as I happened on a bunch of UMSU protesters on one side of the University Centre patio and a microphone and media on the other side, while going to find some lunch. About halfway through Hugh’s speech, they began several yells and chants including “Education is a right. We will not give up the fight.”, “Sign the pledge.” “Keep the freeze, reduce the fees.” and other such Day of Action lines. Don’t you think the government would me more willing to listen to and work with student leaders if they (the student leaders) didn’t make government leaders look bad at every opportunity?

Back to the topic at hand. This announcement was very much lacking in any concrete information. I am happy about the thought of striking a taskforce to examine the situation facing PSE in this province. It is an acknowledgment that there are problems facing PSE in the province, and that the party doesn’t have the answers, but is going to study the problem to find some solutions. A sensible approach that I wish politicians would take more often. Whether or not this taskforce actually a) accomplishes what it sets out to do, b) is composed of those who truly understand PSE and its problems, and c) is free to do its job without political influence, is another question. This taskforce could (and I suspect will) conclude, amongst other things, that the tuition freeze is a bad thing and recommend that the government lift the freeze. In other words, this is the PC way of planning to lift the freeze without campaigning one way or another on the issue — they can pass the buck to the taskforce.

Leaving this conspiracy theory for a moment, let’s look at the other planks of the Tory PSE policy. Doubling the Manitoba Scholarship and Bursary program funding sounds good, but I’m not sure one way or another how much of an effect this will have. As for allowing faculty tuition increases following referendums, presumably instead of the current five criteria of the Minister of Advanced education, this is what the government should have been doing in the first place.

Bottom line: A whole lot of vague from Manitoba’s PCs. They want to strengthen Manitoba’s universities, but the solutions to the problems facing these institutions will be found by a taskforce (and may or may not be implemented by government). While I have high hopes for such a taskforce if the PCs form the government, cynical old me suspects that this taskforce may be used mainly as an instrument to lift the tuition freeze while allowing the PCs to campaign to those 82% of Manitobans mentioned above.

Conclusion
PSE is not a priority for Manitobans, as evidenced by the lacking policy presented during this campaign. Despite a desire to keep young people in the province, there seems to be little interest in seriously supporting the institutions (except perhaps by the Liberals) that are being attended by and developing more young Manitobans than ever before. Cast your ballots wisely, if you do at all.

Some examples to illustrate:

• Before my final year of high school, I had never even heard of Engineering, let alone considered entering that faculty.
• When I started University, I never expected or planned to ever be a member of the student council. If you would’ve told me that four years later, I would be Senior Stick, I would’ve laughed at you.
• At the start of my year as Senior Stick, I never expected that I would be speaking and rallying on the steps of the Legislature.

If I keep this up, I might just have an interesting life — but I won’t see it coming. Ah serendipity.

You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You’ll never remember class time, but you’ll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday. Spend money you don’t have. Drink ’til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does…

-Tom Petty

A hat tip to Bessam Mustafa for this one.

This plane is supposed to include:

• Full composite airframe and fuselage
• Narrower wingspan than either the B737 or the A320
• Engines designed in-house featuring hydrogen peroxide oxidizing agent
• Fly-by-wire avionics system

What’s the catch? You have to pay $100 for the “privilege” of becoming a contractor, after which you receive one share and $50 back at the end of the year. If you wish to participate for another year, it’s another $100, and the process repeats.

I hate to rain on peoples’ parades, but I wouldn’t go near this one, either as an investor or a student. Unfortunately it was mailed out to many of the Engineering schools across Canada — I hope people aren’t too gullible.

The advantage that wedgelets offer over conventional image representation and decomposition techniques used for filtering/compressing/simplifying images (i.e. 2-D Fourier/Wavelet Transform) is that they are very well-suited to representing image edges, which is typically how the most important information in an image is stored. Another advantage of wedgelets is that geometric information is inherent in a wedgelet representation. This means that once you represent an image using wedgelets, you also know where the edges are in the image, potentially saving you from performing edge detection at a later time.

My next goal is to implement the full wedgelet transform. In addition to having more wedge orientations, this involves having squares of various scales in the image so that more wedges can be used to represent a detailed area of an image, while fewer wedgelets can be used to represent large, slowly-changing areas of an image.

This post was mainly for the engineers in the crowd. However, as usual, a picture is worth a thousand words, so if you don’t understand or need a visual explanation click on the picture above to see the wedgelets used to approximate an image of a star.

Having been a bad blogger as of late, I trawled through my iPhoto collection looking for an interesting photo for the ol’ blog. The perfect thing to do on the eve of an Engineering Economics midterm.

And here you are dear reader: September 30, 2005 — Ryan, me, Scott, Jane and Daryl sitting behind our interlocking brick handiwork, seconds before an unfriendly PCL guy came and told us to remove it. A shame really… they should’ve worked our design into the finished sidewalk.