It's time for me to search for a new place to rent, and once again the quality of the landlords is a mixed bag. One problem I've had with some landlords over the years is their tendency to demand rather intimate personal information for the purposes of vetting their prospective tenants.

The first piece of personal information that I take issue with is the social insurance number. SINs are not necessary to facilitate a credit check; name and date of birth are sufficient. There are very few organizations that are legally required to use the SIN. If it doesn't involve your employer, your banker, or the CRA, generally speaking you don't need to give it out.

The second identification number that I won't divulge is my driver's license number. First of all, my driver's license is supposed to identify me as an operator of a motor vehicle. As far as I'm concerned, any other use of the number is not reasonable (note that I am talking about the actual ID number on the license, not the license itself). Second, even with that number, what can a landlord legitimately do with it? Privacy laws do not permit the government to just go around and divulge information to whomever walks in the door brandishing somebody's driver's license number. The landlord could provide it to the police in the event of an incident, but he could also provide it to all kinds of unknown third parties at any time. I would argue that there are many more illegitimate activities that can be performed with somebody's driver's license number than legitimate activities.

I would suggest that it's far more risky to the tenant to disclose such information to a landlord than it is for the landlord to rent to that tenant. The other day, when I refused to provide my SIN and driver's license number, the property manager looked at me incredulously and exclaimed, "But this is a $400,000 house! The owners need to protect themselves!"

That might be true, but I need to protect myself. As far as I'm concerned, my identity is worth more to me than $400,000.

I love how the landlord expects the tenants to provide all of this information, yet the landlord is a complete stranger. I find it amusing that owning a rental property supposedly makes this person a trustworthy citizen of good standing. The landlord doesn't trust me, so he wants my SIN and driver's license numbers. However, I'm just supposed to accept at face value that the landlord will properly use and safeguard that information. I think that the next time somebody demands this information, I'll agree to provide it on the condition that the landlord provides me with his SIN and driver's license numbers. It seems only fair, right? I'd be interested to see how many actually would go for it. My guess: not many.

I often get the impression from landlords that, if I refuse to provide my driver's license number and SIN, they'll just find another tenant who will. While that might be the reality of the current rental market in Calgary, there's one problem with this practice:

It's illegal under both provincial and federal legislation.

Both the Alberta PIPA and the federal PIPEDA state that an organization cannot require consent to collect personal information as a condition of the supply of a product or service (beyond what is required to supply that product or service). In other words, because the SIN is not necessary for a credit check, a landlord legally cannot refuse to rent to a prospective tenant who refuses to disclose it. Because operating a motor vehicle has nothing to do with renting a house, and the driver's license number serves very little legitimate purpose outside of that domain, this also applies to the driver's license number.

The biggest problem that I see here is that these behaviours, while obvious to a tenant, are also hard to prove. I'd love to file a complaint against a landlord who is engaging in this behaviour, but I'd also need enough information to be able to know whom I was complaining about. It has been my experience that I never really find out much information about a prospective landlord beyond a first name until we're both ready and willing to sign on the dotted line. Second, how does one produce evidence that the non-disclosure of unnecessary personal information is the reason for being refused as a tenant? In reality, it's the tenant's word against the landlord's. Unless the landlord is either clueless or stubborn, it would probably be challenging to get him to admit to a privacy commissioner that he was engaging in such behaviour.

Until the time comes that I can snare a complaint, I'll just keep on searching. Oh, and by the way, if you have a property to rent in Calgary and you'll give me your SIN, let me know!

This past March I was a judge for a regional science fair. Having entered a regional science fair six times, travelled to the Canada-Wide Science Fair twice, and having won a gold medal at a Canada-Wide Science Fair, I think that I bought a unique perspective to judging. Having said that, there were some standout issues that I noted with the projects that I saw, and I'd like to put them up here in case anybody (perhaps an adviser to a science fair student) finds them useful.

1. Wikipedia is not an acceptable bibliography entry.
   
   I don't think that I saw a single project without a Wikipedia reference in the bibliography (I was rather startled to see this, but much has changed in the decade since my peak at the science fair). Why is this a problem? Let's start with the obvious: Anybody can edit Wikipedia. I know that there has been plenty of debate about whether Wikipedia is better than any other encyclopedia, but lets face it: its content is in a constant state of flux and is not always subjected to the same scrutiny as more authoritative sources -- such uncertainty is not welcome in a scientific endeavour. Furthermore, encyclopedias alone do not go into enough depth on a subject to provide sufficient research. Few projects had rich bibliographies containing credible books or papers related to their subjects. Especially at the high school level, I really think that the creator of a winning project needs to spend some time at a post-secondary library. I used to spend plenty of time at our local college library and, since I mostly did computer science projects, at computer book stores. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that the internet isn't a useful resource. I am saying that the internet resources need to be credible, and I am tremendously disappointed that the students' advisers did not point out these problems.



2. Science Fair projects need to show some science.
   
   This entry really applies more to students in the upper years whose projects might be considered for the Canada-Wide Science Fair. I witnessed this problem with engineering projects in particular, but it really applies to every category: It's great if the student is able to build something and explain how it works. On the other hand, why it works is just as (if not more) important than the how. I want to illustrate this in terms of a hypothetical project involving a mechanical device. Suppose that this mechanical device shoots a projectile. Doing trials to prove that it does (or does not) work is insufficient. For this project to really shine, it needs some scientific polish. The applicable kinematics equations are easily understandable by a ninth grade student. If the device is storing potential energy, spring constants are also easy to grasp. If the exhibitor were to combine the physics equations with the actual tests of the device, it would improve the project immensely. For example, the student could do some math to predict the results of the trials, and then attempt to confirm these predictions in the experiment.
   
   I was not immune from this issue. For my first science fair project in seventh grade, I built trusses out of match sticks. The purpose of the project was to determine if the strength of the trusses increased proportionally to the number of triangles in the design. In order to test the bridges, I placed lead weights on the trusses, increasing the mass until the truss broke. Unfortunately I did not answer some very important questions related to my work:
   
   
   • Why was lead a useful material for weights?
   • What kinds of forces were involved?
   • Mathematical formulas and calculations
   • Other issues (this list is not comprehensive)
   
   
   I guess that the point that I am trying to make is this:
   
   
   • If there are mathematical formulae related to the subject matter, learn them and use them (biology projects are not immune to this, no pun intended).
   • If your experiment behaves a certain way, explain why, even (or especially) if it doesn't work as expected.
   • If you make a decision, explain why you made it.
   • If you choose certain materials, explain why.
   • If you can measure something more precisely, do so. If you are unable to do so (perhaps it is too expensive), then mention that as an improvement in your future work.
     
   • If you have a feeling that a judge might catch you on something, fix the problem (the judges will notice it).



3. Watch those constants.
   
   Group projects, remember that it's not always a good idea to split everything 50/50. For example, let's suppose that Partner A and Partner B agree to do 20 repetitions of their experiment, but to keep it fair, each partner will do half of them at his/her respective house and then combine the results later. Hold on! Unless the location of the test is the manipulated variable, the experiment will be flawed. The location of the experiment isn't being held constant! I know it sounds like nitpicking, but it weakens an experiment when a "close enough" attitude is taken toward constants! It calls the results into question when more than one variable is being manipulated at a time.
   

After I wrote my original post about the fibrous thread pool, I recalled an additional issue that I needed to address during implementation.

Suppose I'm executing a function on a fiber that has been scheduled by the fibrous thread pool. If I call ReadFile, I need to perform a suspend operation because the I/O completion port will generate a completion packet corresponding to the read operation. What if ReadFile returns TRUE? We already know that the operation has completed successfully, so why should we bother suspending? In older versions of Windows, the completion event fires no matter what. This leads to some extra activity in the fibrous thread pool that is merely housekeeping to ensure that our completion events are in sync. Unfortunately this housekeeping is effectively redundant. What we really need is a way to suppress I/O completion callbacks when a file I/O operation returns TRUE without ERROR_IO_PENDING being set.

The Windows 6.x (i.e. Vista and Server 2008) versions provide the solution via a new API: SetFileCompletionNotificationModes. This function allows us to disable I/O completion notifications in instances where an I/O operation meets the above criteria.

For all the criticism that Vista has received, I've got to say that I'm actually quite pleased with many of the additions to the Win32 API. I only wish that they had been made available sooner!