Water levels around the island of Montreal are at a ten-year low, meaning risks to shipping and boating.
Updates from July, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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A patient leapt from the 9th floor at Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital on Sunday morning, landing on the roof of the 2nd floor; he later died of his injuries. The Journal elaborates that the man had a history of psychiatric illness. The same hospital saw a similar suicide last October.
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Carrie
Peggy Curran writes an article in today’s Gazette about this. Specifically, she says, “But it’s the job of health-care providers to prevent bad stuff from happening to the people in their care. It’s written right there in the physician’s Hippocratic oath, summarized in three simple words: do no harm.”
How about securing windows in rooms where psychiatric patients are staying?
There are many hospitals in Montreal where windows open and if you were so determined, well, its an easy way out. That said, if someone is intent on commiting suicide, they will find a way – eventually.To have unsecured windows in this case was perhaps, a tad short sighted. Whose to blame? Blame cannot be placed on the staff. To suggest that the health care providers can somehow be implicated in this tragic case is just idiotic. I’m just saying.
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Kate
I tend to agree with you. Even in a hospital setting, a person determined to put an end to their life can probably do so. We can’t lock everyone up in a straitjacket.
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mare
If you have an hospital without airconditioning having the windows open might be a nice “feature”. This woman was not locked up in the psych ward, but was there for another ailment, because in the psych ward the windows can’t be opened (and it’s probably not on the top floor either).
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Chris
“do no harm”, being only three words, is an oversimplification. “do no net harm” is a bit better. Consider: chemo has all sorts of harmful side effects, but overall it may save your life. Similarly, the benefits of fresh air, and the sounds of the outdoors, may be a net benefit for the millions who have not jumped out the window during their hospital stay.
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Michel
Not to be a stickler, but “do no harm” is not a part of the Hippocratic oath. Then again, it’s Peggy Curran and the Gazette, so we shouldn’t expect accuracy.
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Kate
Michel, I just looked it up, and – to be fair – there is some stuff about “doing no harm” in there.
Chris, I can’t possibly agree with you more on this point.
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Here’s a list of Heritage Montreal tours later this summer. (Should post it later, but I probably won’t remember, so here it is.)
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A few Bixi bikes will provide free wi-fi as part of a Telus PR activity. Not sure how useful a mobile wi-fi beacon is, if it moves away just as you’re connecting.
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Chris
Useful for the one riding the bike anyway.
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Bert
Chris, should the rider not be riding, as opposed to wi-fi-ing?
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Chris
Bert, one’s phone can be using the wi-fi without human intervention. It can update my email, etc. Certainly, one should bike with both hands on the handlebars.
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Stefan
navigating google maps (giving voice directions) to the target (or rather the next free bixi slot). did they install a handheld for the smartphone? i don’t know if it works so well speaking out of your pocket …
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Josh
I’ve never used Bixi, so maybe I’m missing the boat on this, but could you not stop in a park for five minutes to look something up, using the wifi that your bike is providing?
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Kate
What you’ll see on the La Presse item is something about an “escouade Wi-Xi” with a photo showing similarly accoutred people on a set of bikes. My impression was therefore that these bikes will be circulating around, ridden by people paid to do so as part of the PR exercise – not rented out to regular riders like other Bixi bikes. For now, anyway.
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Josh
Ah, I see. Well, in future I can see how it would be handy to check stuff just by taking a short break while en route somewhere.
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Kate
Actually, I spoke to the guy who was developing the mobile modem gadget for this project, a couple of months ago. His people knew they needed to work out a way to put these gadgets aboard Bixis yet make them difficult to steal.
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Bert
From pictures, it seem that the Wifi stuff is actually hosted in a backpack. One of the linked articles says that the hotspots will be at certain location on certain days. This leads me to now think that the hotspots are meant to be relocated on a periodic basis (e.g. daily, weekly, special events) and not meant as a rolling wifi hotspot.
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One of the things the Mirror used to do that I appreciated was the September student survival guide, a compendium of information for living cheaply in the city. Everything since the paper moved to WordPress in September 2010 has vanished, so the most recent version of the feature dates back to 2009 – some of the info will still be good, inevitably some will not. But Flat Broke Mtl has assembled a pretty good selection of tips for eating and living cheaply and making a few odd bucks in Montreal.
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The STM says Saturday’s metro outage was a cascading series of computer failures while the outage on July 20, during the afternoon rush hour on a Wednesday – also blamed casually on “computers” at the time – was a router problem.
It would be nice if they’d tell us more, because they’re leaving me wondering if someone is poking at the STM computers.
(“It looks like you’re trying to route a metro train. Would you like help?”)
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Ian
I wonder if it’s related to the system-wide failures of 2 weeks ago.
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Charles
I wonder if this is related to the Stuxnet / Flame virus. I imagine the metro is not run on regular computer systems, more like industrial controllers or something. I couldn’t find information on the system, even from those many detailed blogs dedicated to the metro. Apparently, even the location of the control center is kept secret: “Le Centre de contrôle du métro (anciennement le centre Providence) se trouve dans un lieu gardé secret au centre-ville. De cet endroit, chaque train est contrôlé et le système entier est surveillé. Pour des raisons de sécurité, il n’est pas ouvert au public.” from http://www.metrodemontreal.com/.
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Kate
Ian, they said it wasn’t the same cause. Could mean anything.
Charles, what little I know may well be out of date. The last situation I knew of was that at least part of the control stuff is very old. They’ve been cobbling together an ad-hoc interface between current systems and stuff dating back to the 1960s. This La Presse story from a year ago implies that the process of upgrading the control systems was getting pretty chaotic, and the advent of new trains may be making it even more complicated.
The last I heard, the metro runs on QNX, a Unix-based embedded-system OS made in Canada. Obviously it must be designed to be resistant to viruses, but then Stuxnet was written specifically to drill into just such embedded systems. (Frankly, if I were among the Anonymous I’d take the opportunity to hint around that my organization had something to do with it, even if it didn’t. I’m 99% sure the STM is capable of having a few computer failures without outside help.)
Various people have told me the metro control system is on Berri above Ontario (on the east side) or that it’s at Crémazie or that it’s buried somewhere around Duvernay and Vinet in Little Burgundy. Certainly it would make the most structural sense to have it near the main hub at Berri, but maybe there are secondary fallback control systems elsewhere, which could’ve given rise to the panoply of responses you get when the subject comes up.
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willie granger
Terrible writing in that Gazette article. I thought it was in French the way it began.
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Stefan
in most cases these failures are just caused by human error (programming or operating the system), nothing such dramatic as viruses …
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Kate
I love the quote in the Journal’s version of the story, from a Polytechnique prof: “Les systèmes informatiques qui plantent, ça arrive partout.”
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TransportJames
I know where the new control center is and I have been there and got a tour of the place. But I’m not telling you where it is…
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Tux
Hacking the metro’s control systems… an interesting exercise. Would necessarily involve getting physical access to a computer on the network or somehow sneaking malicious software into an employee’s laptop or portable device… I doubt any of the systems are internet facing. Definitely a social engineering challenge. If I were an activist hacker, the advertising network would be a much more interesting target.
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Nadia Comăneci, who made history at the Montreal Olympics with seven perfect 10s, is now 50 years old and is profiled in London, where she’s working as a broadcaster around the impending games there.
Westmount’s Eugenie Bouchard won the top girls’ competition at Wimbledon on Saturday.
Michel 08:40 on 2012/07/09 Permalink
And higher concentrations of bacteria, methinks.
Doobious 16:45 on 2012/07/09 Permalink
And increased costs, as the ships can’t be loaded as heavily.