Category: Quotations

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Quotations

2014.7.1

The lack of teaching skills means we are supporting institutions that not only don’t do what we idealize them to do, they don’t value and professionalize the things that we expect them to do well. In fact, we have gone to extremes to prevent the job of university teaching from becoming a profession. The most obvious example is hiring adjunct professors. These are people who are hired for about the same wage as a fast food server, and are expected to teach physics or philosophy to 18 year olds. They don’t get benefits or even long-term contracts. So, in effect, they never get the chance to develop into highly skilled teaching professionals. Instead, they spend most of their time worrying about heating bills and whether they can afford to go to the doctor.

Now, of course, universities will argue that they are research organizations. And that is true. Universities do value research over teaching. Meaning that tenured and tenure-track professors, even if they love teaching, cannot prioritize it, because their administration requires them to be good researchers. Indeed, if you admit that you are a middling to average researcher and want to focus on teaching, you become viewed a burden by your department.

Yet, for the great majority of people, their only interaction with a university is through the people doing the teaching. It’s as if a major corporation, say General Motors, decided that their public face would not be their most visible product—hello Chevy Volt—and instead decides to place the janitorial service front and center. Then, just to top it off, decided not to train the janitors.

Chris Lee, “Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either”
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Links Quotations

Privacy watchdog calls for reforms but ministers stay silent

Privacy watchdog calls for reforms but ministers stay silent:

The federal privacy watchdog’s concerns appear to be falling on deaf ears in the government, with three cabinet ministers yet to respond to her calls for reform.

(…)

While Clement has agreed to work with the commissioner, it’s not clear if her other recommendations will be entertained by the government. Chris Parsons, a privacy scholar with the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto, said the government has little incentive to change the current system or increase oversight.

“As revelations come out, that could be hurtful to government,” Parsons said. “There’s an understandable political value in not (enhancing) these audit powers. You can just imagine the first audit is performed and it reveals very high amounts of personal information being collected from various sources … . It could be politically unhelpful.”

My money is on the government quietly hoping the public and media just forget about this issues through the summer, given that they’ll be breaking from Parliament soon for BBQ season.

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Links Quotations

Government snooping on social media may breach Privacy Act

Government snooping on social media may breach Privacy Act:

Those are questions the government hasn’t answered, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which focuses on human rights, IT and global security research.

“This is information that’s been collected without Canadians knowing, and as the privacy commissioner noted, without clear reason,” said Parsons, an expert on state surveillance tools.

“This government is saying they should be able to access public information just like anybody else, but that confuses how Canadian law works.”

Parsons said, once information is made public, Canadians maintain a “privacy interest” in the material.

Without a doubt, this is the most comprehensive piece to date on the federal government snooping on Canadians’ social media accounts.

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Links Quotations

The Canadian Government Is Creeping on Your Facebook

The Canadian Government Is Creeping on Your Facebook:

Christopher Parsons, a cybersurveillance researcher at the Canadian nonprofit Citizen Lab, said the kind of social media surveillance used varied depending on the government agency. Law enforcement might use specialized and automated tools developed to monitor and react to events on social media, while political officials might be checking to see if citizens like new policies.

Parsons agreed that “some federal agencies are likely breaking the Privacy Act, because data is being collected without clear purpose,” he told me in an email. “Canadians don’t lose all their privacy rights just because data is made public and, unfortunately, the government doesn’t seem to realize this nuance of Canadian law. Hopefully they’ll come to their senses soon.“

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Quotations

2014.5.29

It is telling that among the prime minister’s most trenchant critics these days is Tom Flanagan, once one of his closest advisors, an academic-cum-political strategist who is at once both deeply conservative and shrewdly pragmatic. This government is neither. It is reckless, not in the style of governments that overread their mandate, but in an aimless, scattershot way. It is partisan, but for no purpose other than stubbornness and tribalism. It will take every fight to the limit, pick fights if none present themselves, with no thought to the consequences of either victory or defeat but seemingly out of sheer bloodlust. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car, it has no idea what it will do when it catches it.

Andrew Coyne, “The Harper Government Playbook: Frontal Assault or Spectacular About Face”
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Aside Quotations

2014.4.28

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.

Noam Chomsky (via zeitgeistrama)

Post-secondary education is neither necessary nor sufficient to change society. Those of us with degrees need to stop acting like university uniquely equips us to improve or transform the institutions in which we operate. On average, we’re less indebted and more able to pay off that debt as a share of our income than those without degrees, so I’d suggest their debt loads are more of an urgent problem.

(via jakke)

I think that the problem is less “time to think” than “time to act.” If you believe that highly educated people can bring useful skills to bear on pressing problems, but that there are often minimal financial resources to pay educated workers to bring those skills to bear, then debt loads may preclude spending time focusing on those particular problems. In effect, if you can’t pay people to do the work then the socially-pressing work may not be done by those best suited to do it.

To contextualize: when I finished my degree there was a minimum amount of income I had to make to service my debt loads while simultaneously surviving in whatever city I ended up living in. That minimum income immediately meant that a series of jobs that would have been politically and intellectually engaging had to be set aside on the basis of insufficient monetary remuneration. It’s this kind of issue that Chomsky is getting at.

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Quotations

2014.3.24

There is a notable distinction between forms of privatization of military and bureaucratic state functions and examples of Internet governance privatization. Whereas the outsourcing of law enforcement functions or bureaucratic tasks normally involves financial compensation to the private entity delegated these functions, a unique feature in Internet governance is the expectation that some private entities, whether information intermediaries, or financial and transactional intermediaries, should be compelled to carry out law enforcement functions traditionally performed by the state without compensation and often with additional expense and possibly even liability exposure.

Laura DeNardis. The Global War for Internet Governance.
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Quotations

2014.3.24

The tax refund has become a big part of the income stream for many low-income Canadians. Many tax credits are distributed through the tax system. And it’s the least well-off who are eligible for a lot of those credits.

Low-income Canadians can get their tax returns prepared for free at the many free income tax clinics set up across the country during tax season. But because the clinics can’t give instant refunds, it can be a tough sell to have people wait a couple of weeks to get all their money.

“We try to tell them that they don’t need to pay $40 or $50 to get their taxes prepared, they can get it done here for free,” says Viji Naguleswaran, a community financial worker at St. Christopher House, which caters to lower-income residents in Toronto.

Still, it often comes down to personal circumstances. Are these people willing to give up some of that precious refund to get their hands on money now?

“The issue is cash flow,” says Rick Eagan, community development co-ordinator at St. Christopher House. “When you’re desperate, 15 days can make a big difference.”

Tom McFeat, “Are instant tax refunds worth the cost?”
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Quotations

2014.3.20

It is disconcerting to realize that the reassessment of classification policy described by Mr. Litt was not prompted by the diligent exercise of congressional oversight or by judicial review or by ordinary advocacy. Rather it was explicitly inspired by the Snowden leaks, which Mr. Litt described as “criminal.” The upshot is that leaks emerge as a uniquely powerful tool for shaping intelligence classification policy, while conventional checks and balances appear all but irrelevant by comparison.

Moreover, the purpose of the newfound push for greater transparency seems to be instrumental, not principled. In other words, it is driven by tactical considerations, not by statutory requirements or any other objective norm.

“I strongly believe that the best way to prevent the damage that leakers can cause is by increased transparency on our part,” Mr. Litt said. “Transparency can both lessen the incentive for disaffected employees to disclose our activities improperly, and provide the public appropriate context to evaluate leaks when they occur.”

That implies that what is needed is only as much transparency as it takes to achieve these imprecise and transient goals. It is a unilateral move that can be unilaterally reversed.

Steve Aftergood, “ODNI Rethinks Secrecy and Openness in Intelligence”
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Aside Quotations

2014.3.19

…undercutting this fair-to-strong record on the policy side is Mr. Flaherty’s general approach to the budget process, which could only be more opaque if it were one of Frank Underwood’s schemes on “House of Cards.” As the finance minister has tackled the budget deficit with across-the-board spending cuts, it has been impossible to get reliable information on what was being cut. Compounding the problem has been the use of omnibus budget implementation bills, which have included a host of things not directly related to the budget, such as changes to environmental regulations and policies affecting First Nations.

Not even the parliamentary budget officer, a position created as part of broader “accountability” reforms, could obtain the information needed to see what programs were being affected by the government’s austerity measures. Rather than operating on the basic democratic principles of transparency, Mr. Flaherty attacked the PBO, Kevin Page, as exceeding his proper mandate.

This is a pronounced stain on a legacy that is otherwise up for legitimate debate. Whether the GST or corporate tax cuts were inappropriate or whether one ideologically favours or disapproves of the government’s efforts to reduce the size of government, we should all agree that Canadians deserve to know, with clarity, what the government is doing. While much of the focus on Flaherty has been his ability to return the budget to balance, the climate of obfuscation surrounding his budgets is a significant and lamentable background to everything else he accomplished.

Emmett Macfarlane, “Flaherty’s policy brilliance overshadowed by darker politics”

What will be most damning is if, whenever another party is elected to govern the country, they merely change policy positions without also ending the current practices of omnibus legislation and budgetary obfuscation. Fiscal policies are something that Canadians can legitimately debate the merits of. There should be little to no debate that legislation, regulations, and budgets should be accessible to citizens who just want to understand what these things mean, how they are implemented, and the implications of their implementation. A representative democracy is farcical when citizens and their representatives alike cannot discern the actions of the day’s government; as it stands today, much of Canadian democracy is little more than a bad farce.