Is anyone teaching young people how to drink?

In Grade 12, the student council president was in my homeroom, so a lot of posters and swag and propaganda and stuff got delivered to our classroom for her to use for student council purposes.

One day we got a package of anti-drinking posters.  We opened them up and looked through them, and some of my classmates thought that one poster was inappropriate and shouldn't be used.

The inappropriate message?  Guidelines for safer social drinking.  (For example, the one part I remember was "No more than one drink per hour, no more than four drinks per occasion".)  People thought this was inappropriate because the vast majority of the students in our school were under the legal drinking age, and they felt this poster was giving students permission to drink as long as they did so responsibly.  So it didn't go up.

However, I saw the poster and internalized the message.  Then, that summer, when I took up drinking, I followed those rules.  One drink per hour, four drinks per occasion.  Water in between, start on a full stomach.

And I've never had a hangover.  Or a blackout.  And the last time I vomited was four years before I started drinking.

This all came to mind when I saw a headline in Salon refuting the premise of another article that apparently alleges that no one is telling young women not to drink. (The article is not important to this blog post, it's just the headline that triggered this train of thought.)

My experience is consistent with the Salon headline: everyone is telling young people not to drink. 

But is anyone teaching young people how to drink?  Is the information about timing and spacing and what constitutes moderate consumption and what constitutes safe consumption and what the threshold is for binge drinking being provided?  Or are they just being told not to do it or not to overdo it?

Quantitative guidelines fell into my hands a few months before I had my first beer, and as a result I've always been in control of my inebriation. But these guidelines were kept from my peers for fear they might imply that it's possible to drink responsibly.

How many of my peers didn't learn how to drink responsibly as a result?  Or perhaps even that drinking responsibly is an option?

Secularism: ur doin it wrong

At first I wasn't going to blog about Quebec's Charte des valeurs. I've already written many times about how assholic it is to force people to expose more of their bodies than they're comfortable with and was weary of having to cover the same ground again, and most of the media coverage of this story has already taken that approach so I was weary of having to repeat myself and didn't think I had anything to add.

But in the shower, it occurred to me that it's interesting to look at it from from the other side: instead of looking at what's banned, let's look at what's allowed.

Here's an English-language version of the visual aid that's been circulating.

Look at the "banned" items in the bottom row.  Apart from the giant cross in the left-most picture, all these items have a practical and/or theological function.  They all have the practical function of covering a part of the body that the wearer wants to be covered (with the possible exception of the yarmulke - I'm not clear on whether covering that part of the head is necessary, or whether it's the yarmulke itself that's necessary.) They all also have the theological function of being something the wearer needs to do to avoid going to hell, or whatever the equivalent in their religion is.  (I have heard that the hijab per se is not necessary, just that covering the head is necessary.  And I have heard that the hijab per se is necessary.  So let's split the difference and say that some people believe it is theologically necessary.)

Now look at the "allowed" items.  They're all small pieces of jewellery that display the wearer's religious affiliation.  They have no theological function, and they have no practical function other than displaying the wearer's religious affiliation.  They aren't a part of the actual practise of the wearer's religion, they aren't going to help send the wearer to heaven or prevent them from going to hell (or whatever the equivalent in their religion is).  They are simply a gratuitous display.

If Quebec wants to create an image of secularism, the place to start is by eliminating gratuitous displays of religion that serve no purpose.  Banning the functional while permitting the gratuitous eliminates all credibility.

Analogy: Suppose I have a car, and suppose you have a baby. We have an awesome, supportive friendship full of mutual assistance, which includes me lending you my car on those occasions when you need a car.  But then one day I tell you "You aren't allowed to put your baby's carseat in my car.  As you know, I am a Voluntary Human Extinctionist, and displaying the carseat would come across as promoting breeding."  But, before you can even open your mouth to protest, I add, "But it's okay if you want to put your Baby On Board sticker on the car, because that's just small."


Update: I was so caught up in imagining how awful it would be to be forced to expose more of my body than I'm comfortable with in order to keep my job that I failed to notice two very important things pointed out in this article:

The Charte wouldn't (my emphasis):

1. Remove religious symbols and elements considered "emblematic of Quebec's cultural heritage." That includes: the crucifixes in the Quebec legislature and atop Mount Royal in Montreal, the thousands of religiously based geographic names (e.g. Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!) and the names of schools and hospitals.

[...]

4. Ban opening prayers at municipal council meetings, which was recommended by the 2008 Bouchard-Taylor Commission report into cultural accommodation. The Quebec Court of Appeal ruled in May that such prayers do not necessarily violate Quebec's current human rights legislation.

Yeah. So they're forbidding people to wear as much clothing as they'd like to in government buildings because it might be interpreted as a religious symbol, but they're allowing actual religious symbols actually on display in government buildings.  They're forbidding individuals who happen to work for the government in one capacity to practise their own religion with their own body, but still permitting situations in which individuals who work for the government in another capacity are forced or coerced or pressured to participate in the collective practise of a religion to which they may or may not subscribe in order to do their jobs.


So let's revisit the analogy.  I own a car that I lend out to my friends in a spirit of mutual assistance, but I forbid people to put their children's carseats in my car because "displaying" the carseats would counter my stated Voluntary Human Extinctionist principles.  However, I permit the "Baby On Board" sticker on the basis that it's small.

But now, with this new information, it comes to light that I have a gaudy, brightly-coloured children's playground in my front yard.  Because, like, it's always been there.

Also, since I lend out my car to my friends so often, I'm gathering together a circle of friends to give me their input on the next car I purchase.  However, if you want to be part of this circle, you have to donate gametes to help me in my attempt to conceive a child of my own.

But you still aren't allowed to put your baby's carseat in the car.  Because that would promote breeding.


Not so very good for the credibility, is it?

Mme. Marois suggests that the Charte will unite Quebecers.  I believe it will, against her.  You don't win over the secularists by allowing gratuitous displays of religion in the name of secularism.

A royal baby watcher on why the royal baby watch was pointless

As I've blogged about before, I find the royal family interesting because they have this really bizarre job that they have to do and it's interesting to me to see how they do it.  I'm also interested in fashion, so I will totally click through for a picture of a female royal, just to see how they've costumed themselves for this bizarre job.

Despite the fact that I'm childfree, I also think babies are interesting.  They're all little and cute, with these ridiculously tiny (but fully functional!) hands and feet, and it's interesting to me to see what they can do and to speculate on what they must think about what's going on around them.  I will totally click through to see a picture of a baby.

So that makes me totally the target audience for royal baby media coverage, which I unrepentantly consumed when the time came.

However, I think it was a complete waste of time to have media staking out the hospital for weeks and weeks in anticipation of the birth, because there was no story to be had by doing so.

Don't get me wrong, I do think the royal baby is news, objectively speaking.  Under the current system, he's third in line to be our head of state.  His identity is approximately as relevant as the identity of a political party leader. (But he's much more adorable to look at!)  On top of that, there is public interest.  When you've got a large chunk of your audience wanting to know biographical information about a public figure, it is appropriate to report it.

The thing is, what is there to know about a newborn in the first day of their life?  Their name, gender, date and time of birth, weight and length, whether they're healthy, and what they look like.  That's literally all there is.  There isn't any more yet because the poor kid hasn't been around long enough yet.  Even his parents aren't yet able to answer questions like "Is he a good sleeper?" or "How's he nursing?" because they haven't had enough time to find out yet.

All they could get by camping out in front of the hospital was pictures of the baby and maybe a soundbite or two of royals charmingly expressing appropriate delight at the birth of the baby.

All of which the palace would have released anyway.

All that time and effort and sitting out in the hot sun, and it made no difference to us as the interested audience. It just took up a lot of airtime and column inches on "no baby yet", all of which could have been better spent on something else.  We still would have gotten all available information through official channels, and there was simply no other information to be had.

The folly of measuring calories in exercise

Sometimes people talk about calories in terms of how much exercise it would take to burn them off.  There has even been talk of putting the amount of exercise needed to burn the calories on menus. I think this is a red herring, because it might lead people to believe that you have to exercise enough to burn off all the calories you consume.

This isn't the case.  A lot of calories (probably even the majority of our caloric intake) are burned by our baseline metabolism and the activity of everyday life. When I had my dysphagia incident a couple of summers ago, I was being as sedentary as possible to preserve what precious few calories I was able to consume. I didn't exercise at all, I took elevators and escalators instead of stairs, I took the subway to the next stop instead of walking. Despite that, I still lost about a pound a day because of the calories burned in the course of everyday life.

I'm concerned that if you present food to ignorant people in terms of hours of exercise to do, they might think that in order to be healthy, they have to go out and jog for three hours to burn off their dinner.  Then they might feel the need to exercise the point of unsafeness, or to eat unhealthily little, or otherwise deliberately exercise off a greater percentage of their caloric intake than necessary and thereby not leave enough for everyday life.  (And, of course, non-ignorant people can calculate how much they need to work out for themselves.)

Things They Should Invent: emergency information robocalls for power outages

My power didn't go out in the storm earlier this week, but, being a bit of a Twitter stormwatcher, I did occasionally look at Toronto Hydro's Twitter feed to watch the show.  However, as many people have noted, using the internet for primary method of communication during a power outage is problematic.  People's personal internet access is going to be out, so only those whose cellphones have internet (and haven't run out of battery yet) and those who aren't currently in the power outage area can access the information. This means that the information is going to be less available to more vulnerable people (elderly, poorer, etc.) who are also likely to be less resilient to difficulties of a power outage.

Here's a simple solution: if there's a power outage, Hydro automatically robocalls affected customers telling them the status, the size of the area affected, and the ETA for power restoration.  When the status has changed significantly (ETA has changed, or area affected is significantly smaller), they send out another robocall.

People could opt in or out of emergency robocalls, so those who do have smartphones without landlines wouldn't have to use up valuable battery life fielding phone calls that give them no new information.

Perhaps they could also have mass text messaging (for people who don't have data plans - or if data isn't working due to the outage) since that's less of a drain on the battery than a ringing phone.

In any case, methods of immediate and automatic information distribution that aren't dependent upon electricity do exist.  They should make use of these during power outages.

Things They Should Invent: car alarm that goes off if a child is left in a car seat

Recently in the news, there have been a number of cases of babies and toddlers dying after being forgotten in a car on a hot day.  This makes me think they should invent something to alert parents if they walk away from the car with the kid still in the baby seat.

Some of the media coverage (can't seem to google up the exact article) mentioned that there are some alerts that work with smartphones, but those depend on the parent having a smartphone and having the app installed and the smartphone being on and charged.  If your battery's dead, or you've turned off your phone for a meeting, or it's just at the bottom of your purse and you're in a noisy environment, you might fail to notice the alert.

I propose something simpler and more immediate:  if the car is turned off, there is weight in the carseat, there is no weight in the driver's seat, and all the doors are closed, the annoying horn-honking car alarm goes off.  (Proposed added bonus feature: rather than the usual horn honky car alarm sound it produces the sound of a baby crying.)

The advantage of this model is it draws attention to the car, even if it for some reason it fails to attract the parent's attention.  I know people generally disregard and curse out the source of car alarms, but someone walking past might take a peek in, and if the car is parked somewhere staffed, the staff might notice.  This increases the chances that someone will notice the baby's presence and intervene.

Ideas for how this could be engineered: cars could have a built in attacher thingy for baby seats (baby seats have to be physically attached to the car by more than just a seatbelt. The ones I've seen are attached by a bolt-like thing behind the back seat.)  The attacher thing recognizes when a car seat is attached (the same way the seatbelt detector detects when the seatbelt is fastened) and then there could be a weight detector in the seat of the car (maybe there could be a button to press to "zero" it to an empty baby seat).  The car would therefore know when there's a baby seat present and when the baby seat is occupied.

The other advantage of this model is it wouldn't require any proactiveness or diligence on the part of the parents.  If it doesn't occur to the parents to take precautions against accidentally leaving the baby in the car, the car will do so anyway, much like how some cars already warn you if your seatbelt isn't done up or if you've left the lights on.

Journalism wanted: how on earth do fish die in a flood??

Mentioned in passing in an article about the exciting adventure of Calgary zookeepers trying to rescue giraffes from a flood with hippos the loose:

On Tuesday, several of 140 dead tilapia that zoo staff couldn’t save were still scattered on the muddy, wet floor of the giraffe and hippo building. Six piranhas and at least two of the zoo’s 12 peacocks also died in the flooding.

Tilapia and piranhas are fish!  How on earth do fish die in a flood???

It says they're scattered on the floor, which suggests that the water receded and left them behind.  Is that normal?  Does that mean that fish in the ocean have to follow the water when the tides move?  Why didn't the force of the water pull them along?

In any case, you can't just mention in passing that fish died in a flood and not explain.  It's a great big question mark, even if it's not nearly as exciting as rescuing giraffes from hippo-infested waters.

Building a Better Senate redux

I previously blogged some ideas for improving the Senate, building on the advantages of the existing model by making it less partisan.

While reading this article (although not directly related to its content), I came up with a simpler way to do the same thing.

First, we make senators non-partisan.  They can't be members of a party, they don't identify themselves as "Conservative senators" or "Liberal senators", there are no Senate party caucuses.  They're just senators.

Then comes the important part: government of the day cannot appoint any senators who are or have ever been members of its political party (or any of that party's predecessors).  It can appoint people who are or have been members of other political parties, it can appoint people who have never been a member of any political party, but it can't appoint from its own party.

Possible corollary, depending on what percentage of the people who are good senate candidates have ever been members of political parties: each government must appoint a minimum number of senators who are or have been been a member of another political party.  I can see pros and cons of this.

But, either way, it would be the political equivalent of having one sibling cut the cake and another choose the slice.

Happy birthday, same-sex marriage, happy birthday to you!

Today is the 10th anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ontario!

I've already blogged the best tribute I can write to it here.

Dr. Morgentaler

When Dr. Morgentaler was awarded the Order of Canada, I wrote:

What astounds me about Dr. Morgentaler is he had no particular reason to become an abortion activist. It didn't affect him personally, he was older when he got into it (late 40s, if I remember correctly), no one would have noticed if he hadn't done anything. No one would have said "Hey, you, Mr. middle-aged holocaust-survivor doctor man, why aren't you loudly and publicly performing a controversial medical procedure for which you could be sentenced to life in prison?" If he had just quietly gone about his family practice, no one would have cared. But he stepped up

In a discussion of the age at which people learned about abortion, I wrote:

I learned how pregnancy happens around the age of 8 or 9, I reached menarche at 10, and I learned (on a theoretical level, fortunately) that rape exists at 10 as well.  So, starting at the age of 10, I had a quietly ever-present fear of being forced to gestate my rapist's baby, and hadn't the slightest clue that pregnancies could be terminated.  (I was thinking solely in terms of a rapist because I was still years away from being able to even imagine wanting to have sex voluntarily, even in a distant and hypothetical future.)

Several years later, I read something (I don't remember if it was an article or a work of fiction) where a girl who was pregnant thought that if she skipped rope for hours and hours, she'd have a miscarriage.  (I don't remember if she actually tried it or if it actually worked.)  This was my first exposure to the idea that miscarriage could be induced.  I was relieved to learn that such a thing might be remotely possible, and started brainstorming other ways to force myself to miscarry so I wouldn't have to gestate my rapist's baby.  I considered the possibility of simply stopping eating and drinking, thinking that if it didn't cause a miscarriage it would at least kill me, and, by extension, also gave some thought to suicide as a solution.  I was probably under the age of 16 when this happened

I didn't know that at the time, but my 10-year-old self needn't ever have worried about having to gestate her rapist's baby.  Because Dr. Morgentaler stepped up, long before I knew such things existed, I - and millions of others like me - have no reason to lie awake at night pondering whether starvation would be sufficient to induce miscarriage or whether self-harm would be necessary.

Are children really unfamiliar with pregnancy?

I was very surprised to see that some people thought the word "pregnant" shouldn't be used in an elementary school yearbook for fear that the kids might ask what it means.  My experience was that children were familiar with pregnancy essentially because they were children.

When you are born, your parents are, by definition, part of the cohort that's getting pregnant and having babies.  It's therefore very likely that many of the adults around you - your parents' friends and siblings and cousins - are also at this stage of life.  This means that there's a good chance that within the first few years of your life, one or more babies will be born to the people around you.  It might even be your own younger sibling!

And it's most likely that your parents will explain the concept of the new baby to you.  They won't just one day go "Hey, look, a baby!"  They'll probably tell you that Mommy or Auntie Em is pregnant, which means she's going to have a baby.  And they'll probably even tell you the baby is growing in her belly so that's why her belly is getting fat.

And if this doesn't happen to you, it will probably happen to one of your friends, who will then announce to you "I'm going to have a baby brother and he's growing in my mommy's tummy!"

Myself, I don't remember a time when I didn't know what the word "pregnant" meant.  My first cousin was born when I was 1.5, and my sister was born when I was a few months short of 3. I have memories of the cousin being a baby and I have memories where I knew that my mother was going to have a baby, but I don't ever remember actually learning what "pregnant" means.  For as long as I've known, it's just meant that a baby is growing in a mommy's belly.  It didn't seem sexual or adult (because I didn't know what sex was), it was just a point of fact.

So I'm very surprised that parents would think that elementary school children need to be protected from the concept of pregnancy.  In my corner of the world, children were familiar with pregnancy by virtue of the demographic realities of being children.

Receiving welfare while on a terrorist watch list

From Snopes, one of the accused Boston marathon bombers had apparently received welfare benefits while on a terrorist watch list

I'm rather surprised at the tone of outrage, because it seems to me that continuing existing welfare payments to someone you want to watch is a good way to help keep track of them.

 It means they have to tell you where they live.  It means you'll know at least some of their banking information, either from direct deposit or from them cashing cheques, and with bank records and stuff you might be able to track what else they're doing with their money.  It means they have a strong incentive to be where they told you they'll be at least once a month.  If you're trying to track them physically, you can stake out their mailbox on the day that cheques arrive, or track where the debit card affiliated with their bank account is used to get a sense of their usual haunts.  If your jurisdiction has social workers monitoring or assisting welfare recipients, you've got a known person who is not a criminal associate but has spoken to them regularly and perhaps asked them some more personal questions.  Plus, the fact that they're receiving government benefits might lead them to led their guard down - they might think "Surely they wouldn't be paying me welfare if they thought I was a terrorist!" 

In contrast, if you discontinue their benefits, they know you're watching them.  They now have no incentive to ever be where they told you they are, or to maintain any bank accounts that the government knows about.  It also decreases their overall contact with public authorities, and increases their incentive to earn money through illegal means, which might put them in touch with a broader range of criminal element.

All in all, from a purely strategic viewpoint, I'd say it's worth the pittance.

Why not have books in solitary confinement?

From a Toronto Star article about solitary confinement (emphasis mine):

The woman she saw that day looked humiliated and defeated, Pate says, adding seclusion is “complete sensory deprivation.”

“It’s no wonder so many people develop bizarre behaviours and mental health issues when they’re in those conditions, because where else can you go, but into your mind?

Whether it’s called seclusion, isolation, segregation, “therapeutic quiet” or solitary confinement, lawyers at the Ashley Smith inquest representing Elizabeth Fry, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Smith family say the terms amount to the same thing: a prisoner locked in a bare room with no stimulation and basically no interaction with others.

But, later in the article:

a Corrections Canada spokesperson said segregation is used as a last resort for the shortest period of time necessary to manage the serious risk posed by an inmate’s association with other inmates.

If the stated problem is the inmate's association with other inmates (either to protect the solitary confinement person from the others, or to protect the others from the solitary confinement person), then there's no reason not to give them a couple of books.

If the inmate is in solitary for their own protection, there's no reason to deny them something to pass the time.  If they have mental health issues, it would help keep them from getting stuck in their head.

Even if you feel they don't deserve sympathy or entertainment, good could still be achieved by giving them reading material that reinforces the goals of their correctional plan.  In addition to educational materials, they could be provided with works of fiction that address the themes that correctional programs are trying to teach.  It would also make things easier from an inmate management point of view - the most entertaining thing available to them would involve sitting quietly.

Right now we have a system where inmates who shouldn't be near other inmates are locked into a room to go, quite literally, stir-crazy.  Put a few books in the room, and you've turned it into a system where best case they're working towards their correctional goals without interruption or negative influences, and worst case they're quietly passing the time.

More information please

Mentioned in passing in an article about the 65th anniversary of Israel:

Nor will many of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews participate in the celebrations. They regard the establishment of the Jewish state ahead of the advent of the Messiah, who alone can and will redeem his people, as an affront to God.

So if they think it's an affront to God, why do they live there?

Why is a single provider for chaplaincy even an option?

Headline in the Globe and Mail: Corrections Canada seeks a single provider for prison chaplaincy services.

Why is this even an option?  By which I mean, before we get into matters of religion or philosophy or principle, does an organization that's capable of serving as a single provider for nationwide prison chaplaincy services even exist?  If so, why?  Given that Corrections just started doing this, who are their other clients?

They'd essentially have to be a multidenominational temp agency for clergy. Is there such thing?  Or is someone going to scramble to put one together as the result of this announcement?

Why don't you get the bends when you ride the subway?

From an article about digging the tunnel for the Eglinton LRT:

The tunneling crews that built New York City’s subways and sewers around the turn of the last century only spent part of their shifts digging tunnels.

Half their workday was devoted to decompression, so the urban miners working beneath the earth wouldn’t die from “the bends,” the atmospheric pressure-related illness that afflicts deep sea divers if they surface too quickly. It meant that every shift had to have two crews on at once — one digging, one decompressing.

So why don't people have to go through decompression to ride the subway?

Things They Should Study: are facial expressions informative on people who normally cover their face?

Recently there was a Supreme Court decision about whether people should be forced to expose their faces when testifying in court.  This case originated with a rape victim who wore a niqab and was called upon to testify against her attacker.

One of the ostensible reasons given for wanting witnesses to uncover their faces is that facial expression are thought to be informative in assessing the witnesses' credibility.

But is this also the case with people who are accustomed to covering their faces?  If  a certain method of communication is never available to you, would you be able to use it - and use it in the way the audience is expecting - if it were suddenly made available?  If you only ever used it in private and intimate settings and were suddenly called upon to use it in public, in front of an audience, and under scrutiny, how would your performance be read by people who use it every day?

I know someone who immigrated to Canada as a toddler.  He learned English quickly and easily like one does at that age, but he also retains the language of the old country, which he uses to talk to his parents and such.  However, because he left the old country at such a young age, he still speaks the other language like a toddler.  He has a childish accent, and he's less articulate and nuanced than you'd expect of a successful adult.  If he were called upon to testify in court in the language of the old country, his testimony would not reflect his actual credibility, because he's not accustomed to using that method of communication in the way the jury would expect.  Similarly, I find myself wondering if the facial expressions of someone who normally covers their face might also fail to reflect their actual credibility because they aren't accustomed to using that method of communication in the way the jury would expect.

I myself don't have a very expressive face, and my natural inclination is to keep it neutral. When I was a kid, people would always say things to me like "You look disgusted" or "Don't glower at Mrs. Neighbour like that" when I wasn't intentionally doing anything with my face, or feeling any of those emotions being attributed to me.  I later learned how to modulate my face in the way that's expected - a skill I was still mastering well into adulthood, because quite a lot of it I learned from Eddie Izzard - but it still isn't natural behaviour and doesn't come to me easily.  It's like telephone voice or a firm handshake - a performance I can put on, but not a natural reflection of my thoughts and feelings.  However, I'm not sure whether I'd be able to maintain the performance in so stressful a situation as testifying against my rapist, and if I can't maintain the performance my expressions may well be misinterpreted, like they were when I was a child, and be detrimental to my credibility through no fault of my own.

So if it could go so badly wrong for someone like me who has always been in a face-exposing culture, imagine how badly it can go to someone who isn't accustomed to their facial expressions being scrutinized and is suddenly having their credibility assessed based on something that they have never before had interpreted as informative!

I hope someone can actually do research and get scientific data on this, because the only thing I can imagine more terrifying than being forced to expose more of your body than you're comfortable with when testifying against your rapist is then having him set free and your credibility called into question because the jury is assuming you're more fluent than you are in a form of communication that you never use.

Why would you write a newspaper article if you don't have enough to say?

Recently in the news: school board director Chris Spence plagiarized parts of an article he wrote for the Toronto Star.

Here's what I don't get: if he had to resort to plagiarism, why was he writing a newspaper article in the first place?  Unlike students who plagiarize, he didn't have to write an article.  It wasn't an assignment.  He wouldn't flunk if he didn't do it.  Unlike Margaret Wente, it wasn't his job.  He has a whole job that, I'm sure, keeps him fully occupied. How did it even occur to him to write an article if he had so little to say that he had to plagiarize?

I'm pretty sure that people have to proactively submit op-eds to newspapers rather than the newspaper soliciting them, so he could have just not done it and no one would have noticed.  Even if the paper did solicit an article from him, he could have just said "I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid I'm just too busy with my duties as director of TDSB to write an article.  However, I'd be happy to give an interview."

So why did he do it?

Journalism wanted: how can people who find themselves in Amanda Todd's position get their tormenters in trouble without getting themselves in trouble?

Amanda Todd was coerced into exposing herself on a webcam when she was 12 years old.  She was a legal minor and she was below the age of consent, so surely that was illegal on the part of the coercer.  And, of course, having the pictures in his possession would have counted as possessing child pornography.

Then, when she was 15, someone tried to convince her to expose herself again, threatening to distribute her previous pictures if she didn't.  Blackmail is illegal (it's covered in the Criminal Code under "Extortion"), plus he was trying to coerce someone who is underage and under the age of consent to appear in child pornography, and threatening to distribute child pornography if she didn't comply.

It sounds like it should have been quite easy to report the blackmailer to police and put an end to Ms. Todd's troubles.

However, according to the story, the police knocked on Ms. Todd's door at 4 a.m. to tell her that her photo had been distributed. 

If I were a teen in Ms. Todd's position, that fact alone would be disincentive to going to the police.  The knock at the door at 4 a.m. would lead me to conclude that I couldn't expect the police to have compassion for me as a victim.  (At the absolute bare minimum, if the victim doesn't yet know they're a victim, why not do them the small decency of letting them get a full night's sleep?) It would lead me to conclude that the police wouldn't care about protecting me from the wrath of my parents (because a 4 a.m. knock at the door would result in my parents being tired and cranky and frightened, which would mean emotions are running high), which could be a reason to actively avoid police involvement if I had abusive parents.

Therefore, I think it would be helpful if some of the media coverage told teens in Ms. Todd's position how they could get help without getting into trouble.  Can you report it to the police without involving your parents?  Can they investigate it if you report it anonymously through Crime Stoppers?  What kind of evidence do they need?  Screen shots?  How can you avoid the 4 a.m. knock on the door?

Similarly, what should you do if you're an adult and a kid comes to you with this kind of problem?  How can you get the perp in trouble while minimizing the awkwardness and humiliation to the kid?

I also think, if they haven't done so already, the police should come up with a way for minor victims to report their victimization without the involvement of their parents, if they prefer not to involve their parents. Victim Services counsellors should also be trained and available to help minor victims tell their parents if they want, but parent-free reporting should still be possible.  And if it turns out that it is in fact possible to report that you've been a victim of a crime without involving your parents, police and media need to publicize this fact and give specifics.

How to conduct a garbage audit for plastic bags

From time to time, news coverage of discussions of plastic bags contains the results of various garbage audits, where they look at a sample of garbage and see how many plastic bags are in it.   These numbers are often used to support the author's thesis about which measures do and don't help, but I find that the garbage audits I see cited tend to be less thorough - and therefore less useful - than they  need to be.

Here are the questions a plastic bag garbage audit needs to answer in order to be truly informative:

- How many shopping bags are being used as garbage bags?  These would likely be replaced with garbage bags if shopping bags were banned, and therefore would not be eliminated from the total landfill plastic.

- How many garbage bags are there in total (including shopping bags being used as garbage bags)?  If the audit counts shopping bags being used as garbage bags, it also needs to count garbage bags being used as garbage bags.  If there's a reduction in the number of shopping bags but a corresponding increase in the number of garbage bags, banning shopping bags didn't change anything.

- How full are the garbage bags?  I empty my kitchen garbage every day, for a minimum of 365 garbage bags a year.  They aren't always full, I just don't leave food waste overnight for sanitary reasons.  If a significant percentage of garbage bags aren't full, the smaller shopping bags would actually be a better choice because there would be less plastic.

- What is the total quantity of plastic?  Remember how plastic grocery bags got bigger when they introduced the five cent fee?  Suppose I was using 400 bags a year for my garbage before they got bigger (because I occasionally have more than one bag of garbage).  Then suppose the new, bigger bags are always big enough for my garbage needs, so I'm using 365 a year.  If the new ones are 20% bigger, that's actually the equivalent of 438 of the old bags, so I'm throwing out more plastic.  If, in the future, I'm forced to use the even-larger kitchen catchers, that's even more plastic being thrown out.

- How many plastic bags are in the recycling stream? Sometime after we started talking about plastic bags, I became aware that plastic bags are recyclable.  I don't know offhand if they first became recyclable then or if they were already recyclable and I just found out then, but the fact of the matter is that awareness of their recyclability has increased in recent years. If there are, say, 100 fewer bags in the landfill but 100 more bags in recycling, nothing has changed in terms of what we throw out.  Obviously it's better for things to be recycled than to go in the landfill, but you can't claim a reduction in usage if the same things are just being recycled now.

- What is the condition of plastic bags that are in the landfill or recycling but not being used as garbage bags?  I have heard some people complain that they hate plastic bags because they rip.  This is not my experience.  However, regardless, it would be informative to see how many of the plastic bags not being used as garbage bags have ripped. If, for example, 87% of the thrown-out bags have ripped, that suggests we have a high reuse rate and people aren't throwing them out as trash unless they can't be reused normally.  It might be worth investigating whether it would be more efficient to manufacture higher-quality bags.  (Obviously they take up  more resources to manufacture and have more plastic in them so there's a tipping point in here somewhere, but it should be looked into if it turns out to be applicable.)