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Today a Canadian soldier was killed in Afghanistan . That makes 11 since 2002. For the record, I opposed Canada's involvement in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. I didn't question the brutality of the Taliban regime, nor that they provided a haven for Al Qaeda. But I wasn't convinced at the time that invading the country was the best way to improve matters. The events that ensued haven't altered my opinion. Did the invasion improve life for Afghanis? Did it stabilize the region? Did it stop al-Qaeda? What is clear is that a lot of innocent Afghanis were maimed or killed, Osama bin Laden is still at large, and the Taliban remain a force to be reckoned with. Hundreds of "enemy combatants" were shipped off to Guantánamo Bay where, according to Amnesty International, many "... remain held in a legal black hole ... many without access to any court, legal counsel or family visits. Denied their rights under international law and held in conditions which may a...

Back in January, I commented on a newspaper article that took shots at both blogs ("high on opinion and low on fact") and readers of blogs ("getting only the 'daily me'"). In fact negative attitudes about blogs are quite widespread. What's more, predictions are often made that the "fad" of blogging will soon pass. I'm planning to look at this in three posts. In this one, I'll explore what might be behind these negative attitudes. My second post will defend the blog as a form of communication. And in my third post, I'll try my hand at predicting what the future holds for blogging. Dissing blogs The blog of stereotype is truly a thing to be scorned: an online diary packed with inane details of the blogger's life together with uninformed rants—an exhibitionistic ego trip. Admittedly there are plenty of blogs like that. But there are lots of trashy books and magazines and nobody feels the urge to dismiss all books and magazines. W...

As a statistician, I'm sometimes asked to "crunch the numbers". Now, I don't mean to sound sensitive, but I don't ... ahem ... "crunch" numbers. The onomatopoeic word CRUNCH suggests roughness, the application of brute force, perhaps in the form of raw computing power. If you've seen the movie The Horse Whisperer , you'll remember how the character played by Robert Redford worked with horses. Instead of trying to "break" them, he tried to understand them and work with them. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this ... A good data analysis requires care, patience, and understanding. It's a collaborative endeavour that should make use of subject-area knowledge wherever possible. Every number has a story to tell, and that story is not always immediately apparent. What did the researcher want to measure? How did they measure it? How did the measurement get turned into a number in a data set? And that's only the beginning, be...

I just got back from a trip to the San Francisco Bay area. To the left is a photo of a T-shirt I bought at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose (which is well worth a visit, by the way). Various family members have opined that it's just too geeky to wear in public, but what do I care? It certainly encapsulates some of my recent thoughts about consciousness (together with humour , one of the mind's stranger characteristics). I just finished reading Mind : A Brief Introduction by John Searle, which is a fairly accessible work on the philosophy of mind. It seems that some people believe that scientific study of the workings of the brain will eventually reveal all the secrets of the mind. Even if that were true, we're obviously a long way from a good understanding of the brain. On this point, here's a quotation my mother pointed me to: If the human brain were so simple That we could understand it, We would be so simple That we couldn't. - Emerson M. Pugh (as quo...

Everywhere you go these days—online and off—there are privacy policies. I presume most of these are boilerplate. It would be nice if there were some standards. Then instead of having to wade through a page of legalese, you might only have to read one or two lines: "We follow privacy standard XYZ except in the following respects ...". In spite of their verbosity, privacy policies seem like a good thing. I want to know that my private information is kept as private as possible. I don't want my contact details shared with marketers, let alone more personal stuff. It's good to have the rules spelled out in black and white. But let's not kid ourselves: the important stuff is never written down (a piece of wisdom that was imparted to me several years ago, and that I keep returning to). Now, in a recent post , I noted that even the NSA has a privacy policy (the word ironic seems pathetically inadequate). Which brings me to my point. Intelligence agencies, by their ver...