Every so often here at UBC (about twice a year) I’ve contributed illustrations to Discorder magazine, the print wing of the student radio station CiTR. I’ll be the first to admit my illustration skills are hit and miss at best—it’s a good thing I don’t get paid—but I was digging through old files and realized I’d never really shared them. That’s about to change!
Read more...This post is a summary of recent work in collaboration with Prof Andrew Anderson and Dr Joseph Mozingo at the University of Utah, and Dr Harry Kim at the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children. It was recently published in the International Journal of Computer-Assisted Radiology and Surgery as:
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View of Vancouver from the Mount Seymour ski area, taken in February 2023. UBC is behind the middle tree, on the furthest peninsula.
I don’t want to mix my work and research updates in with the eclectic “blog” posts, so they have their own section on this site. Here’s the plan: over the next days and weeks I’ll post lay summaries of my past publications and conference abstracts.
Hopefully I can then keep this going every time I have something new to share, be it a new paper, conference blog, career update and so on.
Read more...Originally posted on my (now-defunct) WordPress blog
The sporadic blog returns! This installment has been a long time coming, partly because of all of the beautiful maps. They’re worth it, I promise. When we left the wonderful and weird world of Proportionalia and its Dual Member Proportional (DMP) voting system, we’d just explored some of its more interesting quirks using some highly contrived examples. In creating these, I was helped along by some janky MATLAB/Octave scripts I knocked up to do all the calculations nice and quickly; the plan in the future is to upload these for public consumption. After plenty of necessary sanitiation. It may never happen. (Update from 2024: it never did — L)
Read more...Originally posted on my (now-defunct) WordPress blog
I’m back! It’s been a while since the last installment of political nerdery, so I’ll start with a catch-up of some mildly interesting news from the last month. Firstly, a referendum on the voting system in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island was met with an overwhelming “meh”, with a mixed member proportional system narrowly losing out to the status quo amid abysmal turnout. Ironically enough, if it had been a first-past-the-post election the new system would have won, as it won in more ridings! Thankfully the result wasn’t interpreted as a generational block on any more change, but rather an opportunity for further discussion.
Read more...Originally posted on my (now-defunct) WordPress blog
Throughout November 2018, British Columbia held a postal referendum on changing the electoral system from our favourite first-past-the-post (FPTP), and one of the options was a system nobody had ever heard of before: DMP, or dual member proportional representation. The people of BC ended up being tricked into voting to keep the status quo for reasons beyond the scope of this blog, but the whole process got me thinking about this mysterious new system. Although the horse has bolted, settled down, raised a family, sent its kids off to college, held its grandchildren and taken a one-way trip to a glue factory in Switzerland, the stable door is still open and it looks untidy.