Last week Jeff O wrote in The Rec about GRT proposing another fare increase. The fare just went up last July.

Here is some of the information from the article:

• Grand River Transit is proposing the third fare increase in four years
• The proposal would make the four-year increase 14 per cent
• ‘Less than 4% of commuters took a bus to their job in 2001′
• Compared to 6% in London, 8% in Hamilton
• One in three riders is a student 18 or younger.
• Two out of three transit users are renters.
• Almost half live in households with incomes below $25,000.
• One in three lives in a household without a car.
• Local taxpayers now pay 60% of Grand River Transit costs.

Now, I have ridden transit a fair bit and some has been good and a lot has been bad.

This is the good:

• Some bus drivers take care and line up the exit doors with breaks in the snow bank.
• Some drivers are friendly and smile.

This is the not as good:

• There is often no answer at the automated telephone schedule. Do machines take coffee breaks?
• It is only a schedule and it tells only tells you when the bus is supposed to stop not when it will. Is its time wrong or are the buses way off schedule.
• Most drivers act like I am not there. I have to ask for a transfer.
• The on-line schedules are in PDF.Can’t they present them in a more accessible format?

Once Ernesto and I were catching the bus to a football match. When we looked at the schedule at the stop, it didn’t list the time we were expecting. I said ‘I must have misread the schedule,’ and we started walking because we had to get there. The bus passed us walking soon after that. Either the bus was 25 minutes lat, 20 minutes early, or the posted schedule was wrong. All are unacceptable.

Using the bus is inconvenient enough that I have chosen to walk 4 miles rather than use the unreliable bus.
Once these girls were waiting at the bus stop to go to the inter-city bus station. I advised them to take the express because it would get them there faster and was scheduled to stop in three minutes. We waited 17 minutes for the express and three regular buses passed us before we got on the next regular bus because the express had still not arrived.

Today I received two requests for information. One was about an obscure piece of history about one of our local universities (the one at which I studied) and the other was for advice on a business case. It reminded me of a while back when I had unexpected information requests about manipulating digital images and the proper use of a semi-colon.

I was able to answer those questions. I like the idea of being to answer or find answers to questions because it encourages people to ask me and allows me to connect with people about various challenges they face.

Even with so much information available, it isn’t always accessible to people because they are unempowered or unable to search for it. Networking through people is still a good way of finding information.

An example is that how I was unable to find the correct term for the thing that the Droste effect describes. I had to find out from Papa who had it clipped out in an old newspaper article.

Another way to find out from people is through the toll-free telephone network. Once, in the mid-nineties, I was having an argument with someone abou the composition of Canadian one cent pieces, pennies. He said they were copper and I said that they were not all copper. To determine the truth I walked over to the payphone and dialed toll-free directory assistance, which is a toll-free call, and asked for the Royal Canadian Mint. I called the mint and asked them the question and got the answer.

Even in a time when there is so much information that is reachable, it can be hard to find and hard to filter. Knowing how to filter and analyse information is similarly important to finding it.

Another thing I like trying to do is trying to find the meaning of foreign words that I don’t know. One strategy is to search for it on an image search. The answers you find may be instantly translated in the images you find. For example, you can probably find out what language and what thing a “cidian” represents with that method. Yeah, I like that word.

I helped serve drinks today at a reception for my boss four levels up. I know what you’re saying ‘You served drinks at a reception for the prime minister?’ ha ha. No, it was for the leader of a local concern.

So, I met Ada, Simon, and Kim. As guests I saw Anne L, Barb H, John M, Robert T, Carl Z, John T, and a few others. Also, Lynn, Dana, and Melinda were there.

No one drank any beer though we had stella, sleeman original draft, and sleeman cream ale. We served about three bottles of yellow tail shiraz, two of wolf blass yellow label carbernet sauvignon, and half bottles each of sacred hill sauvignon blanc and the little penguin chardonnay.

There was food too. All sorts of crackers, antipasto, cheeses and fruit. It was all barely touched, so we had a snack after the event.

At the end we had to set down the room.

It is interesting to meet other people in the organization. When it was done we took the food upstairs and people working late were grateful. It was fun and reminded me what I like about F&B.

An eavestrough fell off the house today. At least all the giant icicles fell with it and no longer endanger our heads.

In earlier news, my soccer ball fell back to earth. Ernesto had inadvertently thrown it on the roof while trying to break off the large icicles.

We had some big icicles on our house too. Walking around the neighbourhood and seeing all the icicles just shows how much energy is being wasted from poor insulation.

During the Liberal leadership race people talked about Dion having a dog named Kyoto. The Ceeb is telling me that former environment minister David Anderson had a dog named Kyoto earlier.

Leader Stephane Dion not first Liberal to call his dog Kyoto CBC 1 Feb 2007

Liberals are double-dog daring the Conservatives to embrace Kyoto.

Turns out Stephane Dion is not the only former Liberal environment minister to name his canine companion after the international climate change treaty. David Anderson, who held the environment post before Dion, also has a dog named Kyoto.

I think that owning a dog increases your ecological footprint. THis spring I will plant two trees and name them Kyoto. Take that.

Oh, but a dog would probably come along and pee on them.

Yesterday Melba and I went to a teaching workshop.

Intercultural Teaching Series
What’s the hidden message?
Paralinguisticin the Classroom

Kathryn taught us about the how teachers and students act and interact non-verbally and how to accommodate teaching students from other cultures.

These are some things Kathryn told us:

• In responses Canadian students usually say 3 sentences; asian students (she referred to confucian heritage cultures) usually say one; latin american students sometimes say 5
• Levels of social interaction L1 FUnctional/Professional, L2 Social/Polite, L3 Friendship/Warmth, L4 Love/Intimacy, L5 Sexual Interest
• Proxemics (the effects of spatial distance between people interacting) greeting, lecturing, chatting, leave taking
• Body movement - posture, shrugs, shifting, walking speed
• Haptics (touching behaviour) - handshakes/hugs/kisses/touches, when? technique? who to whom? rewards and punishments
• Volume for Utterance - people speak more loudly along this continuum CHC –> Britain –> North America –> Mediterranean –> Latin America –> Baltic Region
• Area for Gesturing - chest –> head to chest triangle –> arm’s reach
• Gesture Types - deictic, iconic, batonic, conventional, symbolic
• Head movement tilting, nodding, shaking
• Occulesics (eyes in communication) - direct eye contact, indirect eye contact, scanning for safety and control, staring for interest or control
• Voice - tone, stress, rate, volume, enunciation
• Discourse Rules - pauses/acceptance of silence, numbers of utterances allowed, expectation of affirmation; types of affirmation - praise, elaborate, personalise
• Emotional Regulation and Facial Expression - smiling, frowning, pouting, sulking, scowling, sneering
• Toastmasters says you should have a continuous smile for a North American audience

She told us some stories like:

• When a father who was Russian was talking to his son’s teacher and spoke loudly and stood up a couple of times while they were talking. She got scared and called for security and police. He had to explain to them how he was acting normal.
• She was teaching esl and early in the class a latin fellow gave a big hug to a chinese girl and she was shocked and trembling from it, which shows the differences in haptics. By the end of the class she was used to it enough to give him a hug, which shows her adaptability to the cultural difference.
• She was asked to help an scientist at a western company with fitting in. When she met with him he was staring all the time. She found out that someone had told him that in western culture you have to maintain eye contact or you will appear “shifty.” He even wrote the word shifty down. She told him not to keep eye contact longer than 3 seconds.
• thumbs up means “good” around here but means “up yours” in the middle east; rubbing your thumb and fingers together means money here but means masturbation somewhere else; a visiting student from hong kong would point at her nose to indicate herself rather than pointing to the chest as we do.

That was interesting.

The deputy governor of the Bank of Canada spoke to Hiro and me about inflation targeting on Tuesday. Some other kids were there too.

“One of the passions I have, outside of economics, is history. I will be putting inflation targeting in a historical context,” David Longworth said after being introduced by chair Burbage at the outset of the talk.

I think it would have been a snoozer for many, it seemed like this guy was more used to talking to old white guys in business suits. I found the subject matter interesting and you could tell from how he responded during question period that he was a good guy and concerned about people understanding the topic. He also seemed super smart.

• He talked about the changes in monetary policy in Canada over time.
• Canada was the first country in the post-war period to move to flexible exchange rates in 1950
• There were periods of high inflations during the oil crisis
• There were other changes along the way, changing back to a set exchange rate and so forth, but
• In Feb 1991 the Bank changed to inflation targeting.
• Over a year or so they brought the target down to around 2% (between 1% and 3%)
• He said that Canada was the first, but NZ and Chile both claim also to be the first, but he made arguments against those claims
• He showed some graphs indicating the confidence in the ability of the bank to control inflation
• One graph showed the difference between nominal and inflation adjusted bond rates
• Another showed the proportion of employment contracts with cost of living adjustment clauses (the idea is if inflation is going to be stable and low a COLA would not be necessary)
• The next graph showed the average length of collective bargaining agreements has increased to an average of 42 month (again with stability you can be more confident that what you negotiate now will be worth as much in the future)

During question period people seemed to be trying to sound smart:

• “Why do we still have a fiat money system?” — “As opposed to what?”
• “There has been so much growth in the commodity index compared to CPI. . . . Are you saying that the commodity market is inefficient?” — “No.”
• “My research is on this topic . . . (five minutes pass) . . . ?”

Then we left.

Big video store chains have done away with late fees. Since I have been borrowing a lot of videos from the Waterloo Public Library, I have notice the inversion of charges between the two types of lenders.

At video stores you pay to borrow, but bringing it back late is free; at libraries borrowing is free, but you pay to bring it back late.

For the first time in several terms, I am not captaining a team in campus recreation soccer. I am playing on a team organized by Steve, who has tended goal for us in the past. This term, because of the season, we play in a basketball court sized gym.
We have not been doing well. We are winless (and tieless) in four matches. I missed the first two, so i have only seen and played in the last two.

In our third match I scored first on a penalty, blasting it into the bottom right corner, 1-0. Soon after
Christian put in another goal. It was 2-0.

We ended up losing 5-2.

In our last match, this week, I scored again, but it didn’t help. We ended up losing 8-2.

The problem is that we aren’t playing in a co-ordinated way. Individually the minimum talent and skill is still good, but several players aren’t committed to close marking on d and running into space and supporting on the o. In the small court mistakes are easily punished with goals for the other team as we have seen several times.

I think we can improve our play with a few simple things. It will just take some leadership and cooperation.