Chandra Clarke

Offering Light and Laughter Wherever I Can

  • Home
  • About
  • Books & Shorts
  • Press & Awards
  • Citizen Science
  • Contact Me

A small town solution

January 9, 2023 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

It’s well known that big cities have lots of problems. They tend to be overcrowded, dirty, noisy, and just basically nasty to live in.

The problems seem intractable. People are generally stubborn about urban living; they absolutely insist on living somewhere there is employment, entertainment, opportunities and other people to chum with. Go figure. 

These are not just minor inconveniences, either. There are a number of studies on the effects of urban living on humans, and most of them are not good. Stress, pollution, loneliness all have serious consequences for our mental health. We need to work out how to mitigate these issues. That is, before the rest of the planet moves into suburbia.

Part of the problem is that cities — especially North American cities — are concrete monstrosities. We’ve built out instead of up, and in most cases, given over far too much space to parking lots instead of parks. We don’t spend much time outside because outside is unpleasant and it takes too long to walk or bike anywhere.

As we rebuild older structures, we need to contract inward, replacing strip malls with smaller footprint buildings, making 3-6 floor apartment buildings instead of either looming towers or dismal fourplexes. And we need much, much, more green space. Electrifying our transit systems and working toward better public transit should help address that. In my book Echoes of Another, I posit a fleet of public, shared electric cars for the ‘last mile’ of public transit, but we also need electric buses and either electric or hydrogen trains.

We’ve also built anonymous, unfriendly places. The fix here might lie in changing our perceptions. For example, instead of looking at cities a single, sprawling complex, maybe should start thinking of it in terms of a bunch of small towns stuck together.

I say this because of an incident that happened in my town over one summer many years ago. It was hot of course, the nights were long, and the local teenagers were bored. The local park was quite vacant between midnight and 6 a.m., and so it was a perfect target for vandalism. Between burnt picnic tables, graffiti, and broken bottles in the swimming pool, the costs were adding up. Officials had tried staking out the park and calling the police, but the kids knew exactly when to scatter. For a while, it looked like the only solution was to shut down the park for good.

Then someone had the novel idea of approaching the teens to talk to them. The connection between the stuff they buy, taxes, and municipal budgets was explained. They were encouraged to think of how much more boredom they’d suffer from without the recreation facilities. Indeed, they were asked to think.

It worked. The older kids didn’t like the idea of a shutdown, so they agreed to try to prevent vandalism. The eldest one even began asking questions about municipal government, and the election process. 

From gang leader to town father? It could happen.

Obviously, it’s not as simple as all that. The “rational discussions” were helped a great deal by the fact that every one knew who the trouble makers were, and more importantly, where their parents lived. Not every kid is approachable either, and there are still incidents of vandalism — but not nearly as many as before.

The point is though, while you may not know who the problem people are fifteen blocks away — you likely have a good idea who they are in your own neighbourhood. Or to put it another way, your small town.

You see, small towns work because everyone knows everyone else. While 75% of the population might not give a darn about the welfare of the community, the top 25% do, and the size of the town is just enough for them to handle.

Cities meanwhile, suffer from anonymity. It’s not unusual for people to spend years in one place and not know a single neighbour. Nobody cares.

Certainly, we don’t want to develop some sort of Big Brother society, but there has got to be a compromise. Maybe there’s a good reason why you don’t want to associate with some of your neighbours; but even if just a few of you on each street get together to form those committees, the urban renewal groups, and the Optimist Clubs — that’s better than watching your community dissolve around you. 

Small town people sometimes complain that everyone knows their business, and that the rumours travel faster than they can in the car. However, small town people almost always say that their communities are the best places to live. Now you know why.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

A View From the Stands…

July 8, 2021 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

You read this space for the unusual opinions and the occasional laugh, right? Keep that in mind. I say that because I’m going to talk about professional sports. Even worse, I’m going to be sympathetic to the players.

There’s always a lot of talk about “fat-cats” and “greedy vs. greedier” in connection with professional sports. Whenever contract talks or strike actions come up in conversation around the water cooler, people inevitably end up complaining about the high salaries and spoiled players. And it’s true: some player salaries are astronomical, and some players act very spoiled as a result.

However, professional athletes, in spite of the multi-digit salary figures, have it tougher than you think. (Hey, bear with me!) Consider, for a moment, the single issue of job security. First of all, you have to be good enough to make to the big leagues, which means spending a lot of time on unknown, mostly unloved, and underpaid ball teams — in the hopes of catching the eye of a scout. If you don’t make it, you’ve just wasted the prime of your life honing skills that aren’t remotely useful. Last time I looked, bat swinging didn’t qualify under the heading “work experience” on your resume. Unless you’re looking to join the mafia, I guess.

Once you get to the big leagues, you have to stay there. What the heck is “secure” about basing your entire income on your ability to consistently hurl an 80 kph ball at a small target? And what happens if your nephew decides to give you a real-life demonstration of his new karate skills? Crack! Bad rotator cuff? Goodbye stardom. Unless you’re Nolan Ryan, you have to count on a short, and probably painful career.

Forget stability. Too bad if your wife has friends and a job in this city. Too bad your kids are well-established in school. You’ve just been traded to the west coast. Ciao. Next year? Maybe Japan will take you. Or, you can spend your career on the road away from family completely. How many marriages survive that?

How about employer expectations? Everyone makes mistakes, but your boss doesn’t tape your on-the-job whoopsies and broadcast them around the world. (“Tonight on OfficeBeat – Bernie fries the photocopier! Instant replays!”) There aren’t too many radio call-in shows that feature an up-close-and-personal discussion on your recent email slump. And have you ever had to make deliveries while being watched by 50,000 rowdy, beer-drinking fans? Talk about pressure!

Let’s look at the salaries. Sure, they’re big, and it’s not fair that a second baseman gets paid more than a doctor. But, try to think in terms of expenses. Being a superstar has got to be costly. There are bodyguards to pay, homes to secure, travel expenses, operations and medicine to stay healthy. Perhaps the team helps pay for it. Or maybe it doesn’t. That might depend on your last season’s ERA.

We should also remember that professional baseball (and any other sport like it) is a business, not a game. That’s why it’s dubbed `professional,’ after all. And if you think the connection between money and baseball is a new one, just think back to the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, and you’ll see that it’s not a new phenomenon. Kids play games. Adults always have, and always will, play for keeps.

More than anything else, though, sports professionals entertain a lot of us. I didn’t particularly feel the lack of pro sports when the pandemic shut everything down, but I know lots of people who did. There’s value in what they do. Entertainers and creatives — especially creatives, but that’s another column — should be paid for the service they render.

As to how much? In the triple digit millions seems … excessive. Lionel Messi, as of this writing, has a 4-year $673 million (USD) dollar contract, so he pulls down something like $168 million a year. On the other hand FC Barcelona was on track for $1 billion in revenue for 2021, and it seems to me that the players, the people who actually provide the entertainment, deserve a decent piece of that.

Then again, those players don’t win games without a huge support system, and the people who look after the equipment, clean the stinky practice clothes, and slop out the dug outs and the penalty boxes probably don’t get paid nearly enough.

The NHL implemented player salary caps a long time ago, for a number of very good reasons. But as long as we’re willing to think about caps, we should also be looking at floors too: living wages, not minimum wages for those other parts of the sports complex. And as long we’re willing to consider caps and floors in sports, we should also look at implementing them elsewhere, to start smoothing out some of the horrific inequities that plague our planet.

Not everyone paid the same no matter their ability, comrade, so relax. But a minimum that doesn’t require choosing between the rent and dinner, and a maximum that doesn’t result in the aggregation of power in the hands of a few.

And then we’d have a sports analogy worth applying to the rest of the economy. Because we really have to start coming together as a team.

IPhoto by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

8 Reasons Why Kids Should Science More [Infographic]

October 11, 2016 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

From a very early age children love to learn new things, and not only do they love to learn, they are experts at it. Children learn by playing, observing, doing, testing ideas and pushing boundaries.
In many ways the way in which children learn is the same way a basic scientific study would be conducted: start with a bit of knowledge, come up with a hypothesis based on that bit of knowledge, test and learn from the outcome (good or bad).

And this is a practice that should be encouraged, nurtured and built upon. Science is not only a great subject because of the things that can eventually be done with it, but because of the life skills that it also teaches along the way.

So what are the life skills that science can teach? Check out the following infographic created by psychology and science website psysci to read about 8 of them:

 
Infographic

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Citizen Science: Definition

September 8, 2015 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

Citizen_Science_Center_Infographic2

One of the most common questions I get when I tell people that I write about citizen science is: can you give me a citizen science definition?

For many years, that wasn’t an easy question to answer. For one thing, no one had really settled on a name for the concept. Terms used to refer to the subject have included participatory science, participatory action research, participatory monitoring, civic science, civic scientists, citizen scientists, and even crowdsourced science. Phew!

There has also been a lot of discussion over what the term should cover, in terms of scope, and where it belonged. Was it a topic for people involved in the investigation of the public understanding of science? Did it fall under science communication studies? Or what about science, technology, and society scholarship? Fiona Clark and Deborah Illman would lament, in a 2001 paper, that “concepts and terms used in the literature and the press to characterize civic scientists and civic science have been ambiguous, if not conflicting.”

A few years later, in 2004, Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University attempted to pin it down with a three-part definition:

  1. the participation of nonscientists in the process of gathering data according to specific scientific protocols and in the process of using and interpreting that data;
  2. the engagement of nonscientists in true decision-making about policy issues that have technical or scientific components; and
  3. the engagement of research scientists in the democratic and policy process.

As you can see, there was a fair amount of overlap between the concepts of scientific research, scientific policy-making, and even science advocacy.

By 2009, Jonathan Silvertown was defining citizen scientists as volunteers who collect and/or process data as part of a scientific enquiry. While simpler, this definition caused some consternation because it specified volunteers (leaving out anyone who might be a nonscientist, yet paid for his/her efforts), and it didn’t leave any room for citizen science work in the creation and management of projects. For example, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, a group of citizens would band together to create Safecast.

In 2013, the Green Paper on Citizen Science suggested that:

Citizen Science refers to the general public engagement in scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge or with their tools and resources.

This was better, and more inclusive, but still a mouthful.

Fast forward to last year, and the concept had become a movement, and the definition had been polished and simplified… at least, outside of academia and according to the Oxford dictionary. In it’s June 2014 update, the term citizen science was officially added to the Oxford Dictionary and defined as:

scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.

This is a pretty good definition, and I can just imagine how much debate, argument, and general wordsmithing had to go into it. It’s inclusive of a number of different types of citizen science projects, while keeping the scope vis-a-vis science policy and decision making under control.

It’s certainly how I think about citizen science when deciding what to write up for this blog. Then again, I might be biased, as I came up with something reasonably similar here. 😉

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
Next Page »

On Sale Now:

Recent Posts

  • Dolphin dollars and moose money
  • Better Laundry
  • Five Interesting Things – January 2023
  • A small town solution
  • In the Kitchen

Recent Comments

  • Edwina Cain on Coffee and civilization: coincidence?
  • Jay on 5 Interesting Things – November 2022
  • K R V Hari on Let’s Talk About Lawns
  • Joseph Davidson on Corporations
  • Marlee on Five Interesting Things – August 2022

Your Host:


Offering Whatever Light I Can

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Copyright © 2023 Chandra Clarke. All Rights Reserved.