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Having a say:
– Each vote should have the highest probability possible of changing the representation of the House of Commons

Quick:
– The public should know the results within hours of the polls closing.

Fair:
– Political parties should not be significantly inconvenienced by the electoral system for not having money.
– Any barriers to entry should be reasonable (number of candidates to be a registered party, number of votes to get deposits back, percentage of popular vote to qualify to get seats, etc…)
– The system should not unduly give power to very small groups (49/49/2 split, the 49 and 2 have equal power).
– The system should be ‘simple enough’ for people to understand. Currently, people vote for one person, one party with the same vote. A similar system being successfully used elsewhere in the world is a reasonable way to determine ‘simple enough’.

Representative:
– There are a number of ways to be representative:
– Geographically
– Representation of party by population
– Minority groups
– Diversity of opinions

Resistant to cheating:
– Secret ballot to reduce intimidation and coercion as factors
– Reasonable voter ID laws to increase voter turnout while keeping the risk of personation low.
– Distributed counting makes the current system quite resistant to cheating. One would have to mess with the voting tally computers in real-time to change this. The fact that there is an anonymous paper record of every vote cast in the ballot boxes is also an important check on this system.

As the Canadian government has (very likely) decided that whatever the parliamentary committee has decided will go to a referendum, I’m going to add one more criterion:

– Able to pass a Canadian referendum

For many people, the choice of voting system is not clear, as you can see by this table.

For options, I’ll start with the options considered by the New Zealand Commission on the Electoral System[1]:
– First-past-the-post
– Single transferable vote
– Supplementary Member
– Alternative Vote
– Mixed member proportional.

First-past-the-post:

This is the current system in Canada. The country is divided up into ridings (currently 338) of approximately equal population (generally geographically larger ridings have less population per riding.

Advantages:
– Simple
– What we’re currently doing

Disadvantages:
– Vote splitting by riding (candidates can win a riding with less than 30% of the vote)
– Vote splitting across the country (a party can win a majority government with less than 40% of the popular vote)

Single transferable vote:

Single Transferable Vote (STV) is used for elections in Ireland, Malta, much of Australia, and various other parts of the English-speaking world.

Basically, the country or region is divided into single-[2] or multi-member ridings. In each of these ridings, voters rank the candidates on their ballots. Each candidate who receives more votes than the number required to be elected is elected, and all of their ‘extra’ votes are passed on to other candidates proportionally. If there are no candidates who have the number of votes required to be elected, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed as above. Example here.

Advantages:
– More proportional representation than First-past-the-post
– ‘wasted votes’ guaranteed to be less than (1/(# of seats per riding)*100%), or for example <33% for a riding with three possible elected candidates Disadvantages: - You have to have all of the votes in one place to count them - Ridings must have many candidates per riding to reduce the number of 'wasted votes' Supplementary Member or ‘Parallel Voting’:

Technically, Supplementary Member Voting or Parallel Voting is defined as combining any two (or more) voting systems in parallel. Most often, it is used to combine some proportionality with a First-past-the-post system. Voters would vote twice, once for their local riding, and once for a proportional slate of candidates. These votes would be separate, leading to the results being more proportional, but not fully proportional.

Advantages:
– More proportional than First-past-the-post

Disadvantages:
– Not really that proportional
– More complicated than First-past-the-post

Alternative Vote or ‘Instant-runoff voting’:

Instant-runoff voting is used in various elections in Australia, India, Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and various local elections around the world, as well as by some political parties.

Similar to Single Transferable Voting, voters rank candidates in order on their ballot. If one candidate has a majority of the votes, that candidate is elected. If no candidates have a majority of the votes, candidates are eliminated and their votes are redistributed according the the voters’ preferences until one candidate receives a majority of the vote

Advantages:
– More votes count than in First-past-the-post, as no candidate can win without the plurality of the votes in a riding.
– ‘Vote splitting’ is much less of an issue, as parties or candidates who would normally ‘split’ votes would tend to be likely to be the second choice of those voters.

Disadvantages:
– You have to have all of the votes in one place to count them
– Up to half of the votes in each riding can be ‘wasted’

Mixed Member Proportional Voting or ‘Additional Member System Voting’:

Mixed Member Proportional Voting is used in Germany and various sub regions of the United Kingdom. It was the subject of the failed Ontario referendum of 2007. In most implementations, voters have two votes. One vote for a local candidate, and one vote for a party. Local candidates are elected using a First-past-the-post system. There are an additional number of representatives elected to bring the results in line with the popular vote. These additional representatives are generally based on party lists, but some proposals have them selected on a more regional basis, to allow better regional representation.

Advantages:
– In most cases, as proportional as electoral systems get
– Includes a strong local representation element
– Should be easy to describe to the public

Disadvantages:
– Already failed one referendum in Canada
– Party list seats are susceptible to collusion

Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll go more in depth, and start to figure out which of these we might prefer. Stay tuned!

[1]New Zealand being a Westminister System country which had recent (1992,1993) referenda on changing its voting system from First-past-the-post.

[2]If there is only one seat per riding, STV is the same as ‘Instant Runoff Voting‘.

Enterprise: Broken Bow

November 28, 2016Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Reviews, Space!, Thoughts on Thoughtsadmin

So, we finally watched the pilot (Broken Bow) for Star Trek: Enterprise.

I thought it was pretty good. (I’ll try to keep this as spoilers-low as possible.)

The pacing felt good, through the action scenes, I was actually (figuratively) on the edge of my seat, genuinely tense about what would happen to the characters.

I feel like they captured the feeling of exploring into a completely unknown and dangerous galaxy, that any moment, they could be overwhelmed by an alien force, if they should do the wrong thing.

It was also a really interesting choice having the Vulcans being almost reluctant parent allies. Not quite adversaries, not quite obstacles, but always watching and judging…

It’s also interesting to see the first real human/vulcan team start to really learn to work together. To see the first tentative steps towards actual friendship…Two peoples who know they’re better together, but are still learning to trust each other well enough to actually find the synergy they know is there somewhere.

I had been worried about the T’Pol & co. ‘Decontamination Chamber’ scenes, that they would be pure fan service, uninteresting/unrelated to the show. Instead, they were a very odd, fascinating confrontation between the Id (Tucker) and the Superego (T’Pol). I’m not sure exactly how well the scene worked, but it was fascinatingly brave, having two characters who have to rub decontamination gel on each other, a very intimate act, while having an intense emotional argument about Human/Vulcan relations going back decades and discussing the future of the Human species. As the canonical Superego would say: ‘Fascinating’.

Perhaps the most jarring parts of the episode was the slightly too wordy exposition, setting out the political and historical landscape of the early Federation, especially the Human/Vulcan conflict.

At the same time, the Klingon-Human first contact was handled well, with the imperfect universal translator adding a nice touch.

Scott Bakula was a good choice for captain (although the cast felt a little white male focused, with little differentiation between them, even compared with TOS or TNG.) He genuinely seemed a little more afraid, pushing through with more bravado than even Kirk. But perhaps that’s because he didn’t have his Spock yet. Some reviews described him as somewhat of a ‘pirate’, but that hasn’t come out yet.

SPOILER:

I think the Temporal Cold War arc was introduced well, but I could see how it could get old hat if it becomes too commonplace.

Walking into the Rigel X Trade Complex felt like a very Star Trek experience. I couldn’t put my finger exactly on why, but something about the atmosphere of the music (or the visuals!) was very Star Trek.

END SPOILER

Interestingly, this episode also featured the first in canon definition of a specific warp speed[1], when Archer says: “Neptune and back in six minutes”, when describing warp four point five.

(Neptune being around 4.5 billion km from Earth, that puts warp 4.5 as 9e12m/360s, or 83.3c. This is only slightly different from the TNG technical manual, which places warp 4 at 102c, which can be explained by the need to avoid using warp drive while close to gravity wells.)

I also greatly enjoyed the ‘mad scientist’ Doctor Phlox and his menagerie.

Overall, a good episode (and I believe lived up the ‘best Star Trek pilot’ that they were shooting for). It was more dramatic than usual Star Trek, probably more emotionally raw, but it worked well to keep the audience engaged, by having heightened emotion even while arguing important points of philosophy, almost like the best of the lightsaber battles.

4.5 stars, some of the best Star Trek I’ve seen. Even the opening credits, and their message of humans hopefully striving, made me cry[2].

[1]“Warp 6.” “Aye sir, full impulse.” doesn’t count.

[2]Interestingly, very similar to the “Cineplex – 100 Years of Movies” trailer.

Lesser-Known Parts of the First Amendment

November 21, 2016Politicsadmin

There have been a number of political scandals and events this week. Particularly:

– Donald Trump settling the Trump University fraud case for $25M
– The ‘Stay to Play’ scandal
– The non-blind ‘blind trust’

I would invite you to read about those, care about them, and act on them.

In the meantime, I wanted to talk about the ‘other scandal’, the one which is distracting everyone from the real issues above.

My understanding of what happened is that Mike Pence went to see ‘Hamilton’ in New York. It was an interesting choice, especaially given the diverse cast and his political stance on related issues.

At the end of the show, as you probably know by now, a member of the cast made a statement to the Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence.[1]

People are arguing about whether that was the time and place for a statement[2]. Those in favour will likely cite the First Amendment. However, they would likely reference the part which says ‘Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech’. And this statement would certainly fall under that. But under this clause, they could have made the statement to anyone.

There is another clause:

“Congress shall make no law […] abridging […] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This is what was happening. The people had assembled. There were clear grievances. They were petitioning the one of the most powerful members of the government to be.

This is what the Bill of Rights really means.

This is Democracy.

[1]Mike Pence’s later reaction.

[2]Democracy is messy. People are going to say things that other people are not going to want to hear, at times that they’re not going to want to hear them. They waited until the play was done, then took their opportunity to speak directly to the person who might actually have some power to change things

Global Warming is No Longer A Joke

October 14, 2016Economics, Politicsadmin

“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.”

By now, many of you will have read the obituary for the 25-million-year-old Great Barrier Reef.

From the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, to soil erosion, to peak oil, to deforestation, human systems are good at squandering natural resources and bad at understanding how long it takes for them to replenish.

Today, it seems that we can add the Great Barrier Reef to that list. As the obituary poignantly puts it:

”
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.
…
The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habitat in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited.
…
No one knows if a serious effort could have saved the reef, but it is clear that no such effort was made. On the contrary, attempts to call attention to the reef’s plight were thwarted by the government of Australia itself, which in 2016, shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.
”

This last paragraph is perhaps the most damning. That we selected (and continue to select) leadership that actively works to put our collective heads in the sand, and that we fail to take them to task for it.

But maybe, like the cod stocks, we can stabilize the situation, (perhaps also at 1% of the original), and then start to reverse the damage. This article suggests that the Australian government is starting to pay attention, still far less than is actually required, but perhaps a start.

So, what are you doing to make a difference here? How are you influencing decisions that actually make a difference here? Who are you publicly calling out for making short-sighted long-term damaging decisions?

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Bumblebees are dying.

It is time for us to actually do something about it.

It is time for you to actually do something about it.

Electoral Reform in Canada: Introduction

October 7, 2016Analysis, Organizing Systems, Politicsadmin

During the last Canadian federal election, two of the three major parties made electoral reform* part of their platform.

The goal was to find a better system for electing members of parliament than the current ‘first past the post’ system. Under the current system, a candidate can win a seat with (28.6%) of the votes in that riding[1], and a party can win a majority of the seats in the country (54%) with a bare plurality (39.5%) of the popular vote.

This tends to lead to voter disillusionment, as many voters (rightly) believe that their vote has no chance of influencing an election. The ‘Per Vote Subsidy‘ was one attempt to rectify this, by counting votes to fund political parties, so voters could feel that no matter where they were voting, their vote was doing something.

So, we want to change this system. What do we want out of a voting system?

At its most fundamental, the goal of a voting system is to provide a system for a peaceful transition of power. The way voting systems do this is by making people feel like they have a say in that transition of power.

At the same time, you want the system to be quick, fair, and resistant to cheating (as there are millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars at stake).

(I’m also assuming that we will continue to have a representative democracy, and the number of representatives will remain approximately the same. I’m also assuming that there will be political parties in whatever new system we come up with.)

So: having a say, quick, fair, representative, and resistant to cheating.

Having a say:
– Each vote should have the highest probability possible of changing the representation of the House of Commons

Quick:
– The public should know the results within hours of the polls closing.

Representative:
– There are a number of ways to be representative:
– Geographically
– Representation of party by population
– Minority groups
– Diversity of opinions

Interestingly, the current system seems to do most of the above well, except for representative part (and the current voter ID laws).

Next time, we’ll look at a list of options to increase the representativeness, and see how they affect the rest of the criteria.

[1]Far more likely to induce voter disillusionment is when the party or parties that a voter supports has no way of winning a seat, such as the Conservative party in Trinity-Spadina, or the Liberals or NDP in Red Deer.

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures LXIII: Achievement Unlocked: ‘Gone Fishing!’

September 22, 2016Photos, Traveladmin

When we last saw our intrepid heroes, they were teaming up with seahorses in order to search out the resting place of the Discofish. Today, we see what happens when they finally find it!

After hours of search, S spots the Discofish:

After hours of searching, S spots the Discofish!

She hurries to investigate!:

And reaches her goal, the pole lodged in the maw of the Discofish! She then braces herself to perform that most dangerous of tasks:

She braces herself in the maw of the Discofish!

The climb is tricky:

This climb is tricky... — This climb is tricky…

And success! She now has enough leverage to remove the pole. The Discofish croaks “Thank you.” “You must search out the cat lady, the vehicle with the horsepower, and Prometheus, before you can reach your ultimate goal.”:

So, our intrepid heroes continue on, finding the cat lady around a corner, trapped in an unfinished game of golf:

The Cat Lady, transfixed in an unfinished golf game.

After freeing her, she tells them to look for the ‘truck with more horsepower than you expect’:

"How many horses does *your* truck have?" — “How many horses does *your* truck have?”

The little horsies sing out the chorus “Seek the Eagle upon the mount, where he feasts day by day…”:

This Metheus seems to have lost its amateur status.

Searching among the liver, our heroes find the final clue! It is at Ballyhoo!:

There, our heroes find their destination, where they will lead unsuspecting participants to their Waterloo!:

S reaches her ultimate destination! (The world will never be safe again!)

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures LXII: Wolves, Seahorses, and Ramps, Oh my!

September 20, 2016Photos, Traveladmin

When we last saw our intrepid crew, they had just rewarded themselves with Midnight Poutine, after a long night exploring graffiti and dancing on the Discofish!

We follow as S travels away from camp on a secret quest:

She finds a sandhorse friend!:

Swimming together through the sand, they pass by the Rangers, undetected:

Don't mess with the Rangers! — Don’t mess with the Rangers!

Potholes are very important for the sandhorse ecology:

An important commentary on priorities (including signposts).

The sandhorses have a wary relationship with the sandwolves:

S is startled by the emergence...Yet intrigued... — S is startled by the emergence…Yet intrigued…

But because of the urgency of their quest, they are granted passage on the Wolfmobile:

They gather information at the sign depot:

Somehow, this collection of signs seems to capture the essence of Burning Man.

Take some time to meditate and draw together the information they have discovered:

There are many days where Camp Sensory Underload would be a welcome respite.

And finally end up at their destination, ‘Full Fractal’!:

I prefer to read this as 'Full Fractal'. — I prefer to read this as ‘Full Fractal’.

The Fractal Beings tell them that they must first pass the Trial Of The Ramp. Only then can they divulge the location of the Discofish!:

Stay tuned for next time, when our intrepid heroes discover the home of the Discofish!

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures LXI: Groovin’ Out on the Discofish!

September 18, 2016Photos, Traveladmin

When we last saw our intrepid heroes, they had just finished perusing all the graffiti in the maze-like structure at the base of the Man.

But then they saw something in the distance! The Discofish[1] again!

Quickly, they ran[2] towards it!

Climbing aboard, they were immediately swept up in the joy of being inside the Discofish[3]!:

S is beaming with glee on the Discofish!

While being inside the Discofish was fun, dancing outside in its gaping maw was even better!:

Even the eyes of the Discofish danced:

Flush with success, our heroes checked in at the Carnival, saw some creepy flaming clown heads:

The spooky, creepy eyes of 'Go fly some flaming clown heads!' — The spooky, creepy eyes of ‘Go fly some flaming clown heads!’

Paused to let the Electronik Firebug pass by:

Then went for well-deserved Midnight Poutine[4]!:

What better way to end off a successful night than Midnight Poutine!

[1]The Discofish is not just another art car. Each of the scales are individually addressable, the ‘car’ is totally autonomous, and can navigate and avoid obstacles automatically. Check it out!

[2]Biked.

[3]Discofish loves you!

[4]The best poutine in the world!

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures LX: Graffiti at the Base of the Man, Part Three!

September 17, 2016Photos, Puns, Travel, Words!admin

When we last saw our intrepid adventurers, they were investigating the ‘interesting’ keming present in the maze at the base of the Man. Today, we follow them as they enter a more disturbing part of the maze:

I'm not sure which is more disturbing: the writing or the words... — I’m not sure which is more disturbing: the writing or the words…

This was my favourite installation at the Ontario Science Centre 'A Question of Truth'. — This was my favourite installation at the Ontario Science Centre ‘A Question of Truth'[1].

First one to decode this message gets a prize!

The maze is at an end! We have gazed up and beheld the Man!

This was the most beautiful sound and visual installation, mixing paper with wood and organ music. We wanted to stay here forever.

The regional burns[2] were starting! Time to get moving!

[1]Ontario Science Centre’s “A Question of Truth”, exploring subjectivity and other difficult topics far before it was customary to do so (IIRC, there was a large controversy over it, when it opened in the ’90s.)

[2]Saturday night was traditionally reserved for the Man burn, Sunday night for the Temple burn. Many people brought other installations to burn at the end of the festival, some of these were burned on Friday night. (In 2013, each or many of the regional Burns sent an installation to be burned on Friday night, hence it being known as the ‘regional burns’.)