Interestingly, widespread personal blogging means that layoffs are communicated a little different relative to times past. As an attempt to better control the messaging, some companies are opting to announce pink slips to the public on the official company blog. Take this gracious message on the company blog from Redfin’s President and CEO as an example.

I was watching Anderson Cooper earlier and I heard an interesting perspective on the decline of Citigroup, which is the world’s largest bank according to revenues: after its shares lost $9B in value today, Citigroup’s market capitalization is less than that of Home Depot. If you’re not familiar with market capitalization, essentially that means the largest bank in the world is worth less than Home Depot — or at least investors see it that way. Amazing.

Fortunately for us, quick thinking companies are monetizing the tough times with new booze brands: on a recent trip to New York, I was walking by a wine store when one of my friends spotted Recession Red, a wine conveniently priced under $7 for investment bankers to pick up while clutching their pink slips on the way home. Howe Sound Brewery in BC just launched Bailout Bitter: “bitter ale for bitter times.” Grab a glass and pour heavy!

I’ve automated some of the usage log analysis, but I’m still having to do a lot of manual coding. This is the first time I’ve conducted a real research study and in my naiveness I started coding data in a text editor at first. I soon realized that this was not only an extremely painful method to code data, it was also error-prone. It would be nice to code on paper, but I’m really not keen on lugging around reams of archival notes.

So I went hunting for some software-based tools to help me out. A quick google for “qualitative data analysis tools” led me to this listing of tools. Most on the list are high-priced, off-the-shelf systems. An open source tool called TAMS Analyzer caught my eye though and I decided to give it a try.

TAMS Analyzer (an acronym for Text Analysis Markup System) is a GUI tool that runs on Mac OS X and it seems there is also a GNUstep port. According to the website, it is developed by Matthew Weinstein, an Associate Professor of Science Education at Kent State University.

You can use TAMS to manage and code all the text-based artifacts in your project and it even has some basic reporting features. It has really powerful search features and it makes coding data a breeze. The user interface takes some getting used to, but once you find your way, it gets the job done nicely. It’s certainly suitable for my needs.

(TAMS screenshot from Sourceforge.net)

As shown in this screenshot, you can even manage multimedia files from interviews and associate them with a text-based transcript in TAMS. Thanks, TAMS! I’m curious, though: how do other researchers manage their qualitative data?

By all accounts, last night was full of celebration south of the border. One of my friends in Seattle said it was “like the Super Bowl on Capitol Hill” after the TV networks declared Obama as the winner. (You know, if the Seahawks were to actually win the Super Bowl.)

I first moved to the United States in the summer of 2005 and the landscape looked pretty grim: the Bush Republicans had recently received a fresh and powerful mandate, it was becoming clear that the wars were going to be protracted engagements, and it seemed that America had perhaps lost its way indefinitely. In the words of W himself after the 2004 election: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” It was a scary proposition and a slightly sour welcoming.

As I’m wrapping up my work at grad school and getting things in order to move back to Seattle in the new year, I’ll be going back to the United States with a sense of respect and admiration. Again, congratulations and thank you!

(click for larger PDF version)

I’ve been pretty silent about my research here lately, but rest assured that more excitement is yet to come. I’ve spent the last month or so working (tirelessly) on my user interface. At some point I’ll put together a screencast and maybe put up a live demo version for you to play with. For now, I’ll leave you in anxious anticipation.

I’ll also post some details of the study I’ll be running shortly. The back-end services that support the user interface are humming along nicely at the two organizations that I’m working with and I’ll be starting my study Real Soon Now.

The images I had in my mind while I was reading Jorge’s translation were fantastic: Senators smuggle fellow Representatives into the building in car trunks to disrupt proceedings using metallic garbage bins. Representative Alvarez then accuses her party members of treason and begins repeatedly and inexplicably “throwing herself against the glass doors of the room.” All the while, Senators name-call “bitch” and “motherfucker” at their colleagues. I’m not knowledgeable about the state of political comedy in Mexico, but this would make for a great SNL-like skit!

Arguably, the scene in the Canadian House of Commons isn’t any more civil. Rick Mercer recently wrote a funny piece on the shouting matches and “bad acting” that frequent the House:

I get embarrassed watching question period live and I’ve been naked on national television. Imagine going in to your office or your workplace tomorrow and the minute you see anyone you don’t like, you just start yelling and screaming like a lunatic. You’d be fired. And there’s a reason. Because when people act like that, nothing gets done at work. It’s not acceptable in any Canadian workplace. Why is it acceptable on Parliament Hill?

He then goes on to propose that the House of Commons be outfitted with cameras pointed at everyone, not just on the members who are talking. I’m all for it. If cameras don’t raise the level of discourse and refined behavior in the House, at least the rest of us will have prime comedic footage of our members acting in dysfunction.

For sure, the Conservatives were given a much stronger mandate: they narrowly missed a majority in the House by 12 seats. The Liberal party was all but beaten to the ground, winning its lowest ever share of the vote and shedding an astounding 27 seats. I was braced for a solid defeat, but I really didn’t expect things to go so badly for us Grits. Even after the shakeup, however, we still have a Conservative minority government with Stephen Harper at the helm.

Lowest Voter Turnout Ever

The most disappointing result of the election is that we have hit a new low in voter turnout. Only 59.1 percent of eligible Canadians bothered to exercise their ballots, which I find to be extremely disturbing. It’s even more disturbing that the two elections with the lowest voter turnout have occurred in this decade (the previous record of 60.9 percent occurred in 2004). It’s nothing short of shameful.

Death of Climate Change Action

The second biggest disappointment of the election is the near death of federal leadership on climate change. Economic fears seem to have shifted the focus away from the environment in this election, which means that wet-noodle Conservative environmental policy will continue to drive Canada’s embarrassingly poor performance in emissions reduction. As Gary Mason writes for The Globe and Mail, “… once again, cautious Canada will be playing catch-up.”

The Conservative campaign platform — released no sooner than one week before election day — has a small tidbit about implementing a cap-and-trade system between 2012 and 2015. 2015… seriously? That’s just an insulting waste of pixels on my screen.

For all his failings, I very much admire Stéphane Dion for putting forth the Green Shift, his proposed carbon tax system. Regardless of carbon tax versus cap-and-trade, I feel that we’re unlikely to see more federal leadership on carbon pricing any time soon. I hope I’m wrong.

New Era of Conservatism in Canada?

Third, the results of this election may signal the beginning of a new conservative era in Canada. Stephen Harper has done an incredible job of transforming the right in Canada with the goal of replacing the Liberals as Canada’s natural governing party. The crazies from his party’s extreme right rarely see the spotlight of the media and, in general, the party’s image has moved greatly toward the centre.

All that considered, I think the Conservative Party’s newfound appeal is fragile, simply because it seems to be based solely on Harper himself. Case in point: the Conservative Party’s campaign was extremely light on policy but had an extra helping of Harper. His new and more approachable personality, his new sweaters, and his iron grip on caucus are currently what define the party.

I’m confident in a strong renewal of the Liberal Party, but it’s going to take a long time indeed. Until then, we may very well be headed into a new era of conservatism in Canada.

In Canada, The Liberals and Greens both propose a carbon tax while the NDP proposes a cap-and-trade system. So, what’s a better way to put a price on carbon: a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system? Regardless of the political rhetoric, strictly speaking, the two methods are economically equivalent. They are both taxes on carbon emissions. I think it’s important for Canadian voters to understand this.

Professor Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics explains this equivalence best on his Financial Times blog:

Every cap & trade scheme with an efficient secondary market for [CO2-equivalent] emission permits and a given way of allocating these permits is, from an economic perspective, equivalent to a tax on [CO2-equivalent] emissions and a given way of allocating the revenues from that tax.

Equivalent from an economic perspective means that they have the same effect on incentives and wealth distribution and therefore supports the same allocation of resources.

I also think it’s important for Canadian voters to understand the differences between cap-and-trade and a carbon tax in terms of policy implementation. I’ve done a bit of research on this lately and I’ve summarized some of the main arguments on each side below.

Unknown Variables

Each approach has different unknown variables when it comes to implementation. In a cap-and-trade system, the maximum emission level (the cap) is defined by the regulator and the price of carbon is determined by the market. The price of carbon is unknown in advance of the policy implementation. In a carbon tax system, the price of carbon (the tax) is defined by the regulator and the emission levels are unknown in advance of the policy implementation.

So there are clearly trade-offs in each approach: the maximum emission level defined in advance by the cap-and-trade approach is desirable, as is the predictable price of carbon in the carbon tax system.

Implementation Cost

A disadvantage of cap-and-trade is that it requires creation of a new, secondary market for trading emissions permits. It also needs to be an efficient market for the system to function optimally, which isn’t guaranteed. Furthermore, a cap-and-trade system requires negotiation of an initial allocation strategy for emissions permits, which is likely to be protracted and tedious.

A carbon tax would be easier to implement in this regard: all you have to do is slap a tax on carbon-based fuels. The downside is that a policy with the word “tax” is a hard sell to an uninformed electorate, which makes a carbon tax decidedly more difficult to legislate. I’m quite sure that this legislative difficulty is the reason why both Barack Obama and John McCain advocate a cap-and-trade approach.

Influence of Special Interests

Negotiating the formation of a new market for trading emissions permits and an initial allocation strategy creates ample opportunities for special interests — Canada’s oil sands, for example — to influence a cap-and-trade policy and limit its effectiveness in reducing emissions. The relative simplicity of the carbon tax approach offers little room for such influence.

Regressive or Progressive?

Contrary to a popular belief, one that is held even by some Canadian MPs, a carbon tax is not necessarily a regressive tax. Under a vanilla carbon tax implementation, yes: the tax is regressive because lower income consumers pay a disproportionate amount of their income toward the tax. The key is how the revenues from the tax are invested. If revenues are invested progressively, through rebates for low income earners and personal income tax reductions, for example, the regressive nature of the tax is offset. Carbon tax revenues that are shifted to personal income tax reductions are said to be revenue neutral, which both the Liberals and Greens propose in their platforms.

The same regressive vs. progressive issue applies to a cap-and-trade system: a vanilla cap-and-trade system will effectively impose a regressive tax on consumer goods. If the system involves a public auction of emissions permits, how those revenues are invested determines the progressive or regressive nature of the effective tax on carbon. The NDP cap-and-trade proposal distributes the proceeds of an initial public auction to “green investments”.

The Final Word

Given the time and cost of implementing a cap-and-trade system and the potential influence of special interests that might undermine its effectiveness, I’m inclined toward a carbon tax. In the long run, perhaps a combination of the two schemes will offer an optimal system to reduce emissions in Canada, but in my opinion, we’re already playing catch-up. A carbon tax can be implemented right now and we should have been on this at least 6 years ago when Jean Chrétien’s government ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

The Liberals and Conservatives have both launched issue-specifc websites in addition to their standard party websites. The parties are also getting into social networks: the Liberals and New Democrats both provide links on their party websites to their communities on Facebook and YouTube. The New Democrats are even using FriendFeed, Twitter, and Flickr.

I browsed through the different online campaigns today: Overall, kudos to the Conservative Party for its attempts at interactivity on the issue-specific websites, brilliant idea with the attack ad creator, but the juvenile mudslinging and crappy Flash applications leave a little to be desired. The New Democrats have social networking wrapped up the best, while the Liberals have kept things pretty vanilla on the high road.

Conservative Party

The primary message of the Conservative campaign is that Stephen Harper is the best leader for Canadians — recent polls show that a majority of Canadians seem to think so — and a lot of the Party’s strategy has been to attack Stéphane Dion on his leadership abilities.

NotALeader.ca is pretty much pure partisan mudslinging expressed in a poorly designed Flash application. Earlier today, the website had a picture of Stéphane Dion with a puffin defecating on him before the Party shut it down and Stephen Harper apologized. Hilarious, yes, but kinda shameful. Stay classy, Tories!

NotALeader.ca also features DionBook, a faux Facebook profile for Stéphane Dion and other Liberal Party heavyweights. Generally pretty lame. (Note: As I’m posting this, DionBook is offline because it exceeded its bandwidth limit). There’s also Kyoto’s Dog Blog, a faux blog authored by Stéphane Dion’s dog Kyoto: there’s no coherent message on the blog and the content doesn’t make a lot of sense. Also lame.

The best part of NotALeader.ca is the ad creator. It’s an interactive, Flash-based video editor where you pick and choose video clips to build your own Stéphane Dion attack ad. I think it’s brilliant.

Good times, even though I’m a card-carrying Liberal. Click here to view my ad (sorry, I can’t embed the video). This is a transcript:

Announcer: Did you know Stéphane Dion eats his hot dog with a fork and knife?
Stéphane Dion: No change. I am who I am. The solution… I have no magic solution to offer on that.
Announcer: Is it any wonder Dion has been called “stuck in the summer of love”? Stéphane Dion. Not a leader. Not worth the risk.

Another issue-specific website by the Conservative Party is WillYouBeTricked.ca, a second example of why most Flash websites suck. The purpose of the site is to attack Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift plan to implement a carbon tax offset by income tax reduction in Canada.

Liberal Party

The Liberals launched ThisIsDion.ca today, no doubt in response to NotALeader.ca and Harper’s sweater vest ads. It emphasizes Stéphane Dion’s past leadership accomplishments like his role in the Clarity Act. It also features a number of videos of Dion doing humanizing things like playing ball hockey, skiing, and hanging out with family. Thankfully, no sweater vest. The website’s Flash version is easy enough to get around and they offer an HTML version as well.

The Liberals also launched Scandalpédia today, a Wikipedia style catalog of all the scandals that have occurred under Stephen Harper’s government. Although I’m not sure I’d classify them all as scandals, here are a few of my favorite entries:

• Bernier Affair
• NAFTAgate
• Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL)
• Lukiwski Tape (contains some offensive language)

TheGreenShift.ca is the online face of Stéphane Dion’s plan to implement a carbon tax offset by income tax reduction. It has a nifty calculator on it that you can use to estimate your income tax savings to offset the carbon tax when the policy implementation is complete.

New Democratic Party (NDP)

The New Democrats took a play directly out of Barack Obama’s book by putting a campaign donation request on the landing page. The first time you visit the NDP.ca, Jack Layton asks you for money. I’d be interested to see analysis of how much this strategy increases donations (if at all).

The NDP is certainly more into social networking than the other parties: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, FriendFeed, and Flickr links are all displayed prominently on the main page.

The circumstances under which we’re going into an election are slightly more interesting than average affairs in Canadian politics, so I thought I’d devote a post to examining the context of the election call. For my curious American readers, you can find out more about how elections work up north in the Wikipedia article on Elections in Canada.

In 2006, Harper’s newly-minted minority government introduced legislation to set fixed election dates in Canada with the intent, as Harper put it, to “… prevent governments from calling snap elections for short-term political advantage.” The spirit of the bill was to remove the traditional power of a Prime Minister to call an election on a whim, say when public opinion polls look favorable to the governing party.

The legislation fixed the next election date at October 19, 2009, so how is it legal for Stephen Harper to call an election now? Of course a government can fall at any time and cause an election after a vote of non-confidence, but the bill as it received assent also maintains the power of the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at his/her discretion, triggering an election. The Prime Minister therefore maintains de facto power over the timing of an election, as the Governor General must act on the advice of the Prime Minister by constitutional convention.

So Stephen Harper is acting perfectly legally by calling an early election, but flouting the spirit of a statute that he created carries some pretty terrible optics for him, especially given that he already has some trust issues with the electorate.

So what’s the deal, yo? Why are we having an election now? When Harper visits the Governor General, he’ll tell her that the current Parliament is “dysfunctional” and cannot make any more progress. He met with opposition leaders earlier this week apparently to try to gain assurances that his government will be allowed to govern for another year, which Liberal leader Stéphane Dion called a “charade”. Jane Taber retells details of Dion’s meeting with Harper in today’s Globe and Mail:

[Dion] met with reporters for a drink this week at his national caucus in Winnipeg, and described in hilarious detail his meeting Monday with Mr. Harper at 24 Sussex Dr.
…
The meeting [with Harper] lasted a quick 15 minutes, five of which was taken up with talk about what they did on their summer holidays. Mr. Dion was offered a glass of water.

The fact that Dion met reporters for a drink reflects the vastly different views of openness in politics — after all, Stephen Harper rarely speaks to the media — but the tone of Dion’s meeting with Harper also makes it pretty clear that the Prime Minister wants an election and it has nothing much to do with a dysfunctional Parliament.

Notwithstanding repeated evidence that Conservative MPs are making good use of the Party’s Parliamentary Obstruction Document, a 200-page manual providing instructions for MPs to deliberately obstruct parliamentary proceedings, Parliament is dysfunctional even on a good day. Just sit in on question period in the House of Commons and you’ll get an idea. As Rex Murphy said earlier this week on The National, “If dysfunctional is the test, they’d drop the writ every single day after question period.”

The real reason we’re having an election — and it’s not altogether subtle — is that the Conservatives are sitting on healthy polling numbers and they’re not likely to get any better any time soon. 37% of respondents said they would vote Conservative in a poll earlier this week, which is frighteningly close to the support necessary for Harper to form a majority government.

This isn’t unusual: Canadian political history is rife with examples of opportunism in calling snap elections, especially from sitting majority governments. Harper’s statutory transgression on a fixed election date is opportunistic for sure, and it plays directly into long-standing sentiments of distrust and manipulativeness that Harper will need to shed during his campaign, but it’s also a touch cowardly — if not a little condescending — to pass off a politically opportunistic election call as a result of parliamentary dysfunction. Grow a pair, man: we’re having an election because the time is right for the Conservative Party.

Regular readers may remember that I’m designing my software to display project events to software developers in a user interface that emphasizes awareness of peer activities and changes to shared artifacts. The display integrates events of different types and unifies them in a single interface: wiki updates, mailing list messages, bug report updates, and source revisions, for example. I’ve recruited some development groups who are interested in trying out such a tool and I’m going to be deploying the it “into the wild” with them as part of my study.

The hard part of deploying a tool like this into the wild is that you need data from the wild. In my case, I need constantly updated data from multiple different systems. I’m currently working with two software development groups that altogether use six different systems on their projects, all of which I have to integrate with for my study. Eek!

At first I wasn’t sure if I could get enough data from these systems to build what I wanted. I do like getting (my hands) dirty though and I spent the last few weeks cranking out a lot of code. I’ve come up with a system that acts as a kind of project event aggregator and data store that the GUI can receive data from. Here’s a dorky architecture diagram that I slapped together:

In principle, it’s a pretty simple system. The Event Aggregator polls external data sources for new events on a regular basis, transforms them to an internal representation, and then stores them in a database. The Event Publisher renders events in XML format and GUI clients poll the publisher continuously for new events. I’ll talk a little more about each piece in more detail below, so read on if you’re so inclined.

Data Sources

A DataSource is defined as follows:

• type: A data source is associated with a unique event type. For example, a Subversion repository has an event type SVN_REVISION.
• url: The URL of the data source.
• username: Username required to access the URL (if any).
• password: Password required to access the URL (if any).
• pollFrequency: How often to poll the data source for updates.
• checkpoint: An object that represents the state of the data source relative to the Event Store. The object type varies depending on the data source type. For example, a checkpoint for a Subversion repository is the last revision number that is in the Event Store. The Event Aggregator uses the checkpoint to determine what events are “new”.

All of the data sources I’m integrating with so far are accessible over HTTP. In some cases, I’m using RSS feeds from the data source to receive updates. In other cases, I’m using remote APIs provided by the data source.

Event Aggregator/Transformer

The Event Aggregator is a daemon that continuously polls the data sources for new events. An Event is defined as follows:

• dataSource: The DataSource that generated this event. Indirectly, this defines the type of the event.
• title: The title for the event. For example, the title for an email from the project mailing list is the email’s subject line.
• author: The author of the event. For example, the author of an event of type SVN_REVISION is the developer who checked in the revision.
• link: Whenever possible, this field contains a link to the artifact that was modified as a result of this event. For example, for a wiki page update event, this link is a URL pointing to the wiki page.
• dateTime: A timestamp of when the event occurred.
• content: A string containing additional event content that varies depending on the type of the event. Generally, I’m trying to include as much content as possible and leave it up to the GUI to filter what isn’t needed. For example, wiki page updates contain a diff of what changed, SVN revisions contain a list of files modified, and email messages include the body of the message. Obviously, clients need to be aware of the format of this field in order to make decisions about how to render it on a display.

Each DataSource is associated with a specific transformer inside the Event Aggregator that converts each update into an Event.

Event Store

The Event Store is a database containing all known project events. Think of it as an aggregated cache of events across all the data sources.

Event Publisher/Renderer

The Event Publisher is a web service that sits on top of the Event Store. When it receives a request from a client, it pulls up events from the Event Store, renders them in XML format, and then sends them to the client.

Note that the publisher also normalizes event authors across different data sources. Just to make my life difficult, each data source generally has a different identifier for each author. For example, I might be identified by jhandcock in a Subversion repository and by jeremy@foo.bar in a bug tracking system. The publisher maintains a list of mappings from authors for each data source to a single username, which allows it to publish events generated by the same author with a single user identifier.

GUI Clients

This is the user interface that I’m building. See my previous post for some UI mockups. I still have quite a bit of work to do on the UI side, but I’m feeling good about things now that I know I’ll have the necessary data.