Storm Clouds pix

via Torontoist by Miles Storey on 6/23/08

It's been a particularly tempestuous June this year, with storms rolling in under blue skies and dropping torrents of rain on the city before dissipating or meandering eastwards. There have even been reports of tornadoes touching down in southern Ontario.

The picture above, taken yesterday from the Harbourfront Centre, shows a storm system approaching the city from the east. The funnel shape in the centre is actually heavy rain and possibly hail falling on western suburbs.

Photo by Miles Storey

Reader-based review of Harper's Defence Policy

Harper's Secrecy-First Defence Policy: A reader writes

via inkless-wells « WordPress.com Tag Feed by Paul Wells on 6/22/08

If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper's instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)

So I was really grateful to get an email this morning from Inkless comment-board regular MikeG, who — puttering in his spare time on a sunny weekend — has produced the most detailed analysis of the Harper defence plan's spending projections that I have seen. He even made charts and graphs. And what they show is curious: while $490 billion sure looks like a heck of a number, it amounts to a gentle budgeted decline in Canada's defence effort, compared against major allies, over time.

I'll close by pointing out that a defence policy isn't only a policy for spending. It's a set of choices about what that money will buy. Since we're all planning to snooze on that set of choices in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, perhaps Inkless readers will care to read the policy themselves and discuss the choices the Harper government has made.

Democracy: not only can you do it yourself, I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to. Thanks once again to MikeG.

Cambridge Solar Collector Art Performance

Event Guide: Cambridge Solar Collector Performance

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Shawn Micallef on 6/20/08

WHAT: Solar Collector — A solar powered, web-connected, interactive sculpture

WHERE: 100 Maple Grove Road, Cambridge, Ontario (Google map)

WHEN: Saturday, June 21, 8:30PM

If you are in the mood for a summer solstice party with a technological twist on Saturday night, head to the lawn of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre in Cambridge and see the command performance launch of Solar Collector, a new public art sculpture that allows people to program light patterns through a web interface. The work is by Gorbet Design Inc., the folks behind P2P (or Power to the people), the interactive artwork installed on the front of the Drake Hotel back in 2004 (see Spacing's "History of our Future" issue in 2005, p. 41). It consisted of a large bank of light switches located on the south side of Queen Street that connected to lights fixed onto the Drake's facade, allowing people to write, or draw, whatever they wanted. If you can't make the performance on Saturday, you can experience Solar Collector on any other evening as well.

In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.

We invite you to celebrate the summer solstice at the launch of Solar Collector on June 21st. Bring an evening picnic out to the grassy lawn under the apple trees, and enjoy live music to accompany the sculpture's performance (More details here).–

Twelve aluminum shafts rise from the grassy hill in front of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre. Their graceful shape reflects the angles of the sun through the year. The tallest shaft is perpendicular to the sun at winter solstice, when the sun is low in the sky. The flattest shaft faces the high sun at summer solstice.

Each shaft has three sets of lights, along with three solar panels. During the day, the solar panels collect the sun's energy in a battery within each shaft. At the same time, the Solar Collector website collects light compositions — patterns in light that are created by the community through a simple web interface.

Each night at dusk, a performance begins of all the compositions collected that day. The flowing waves of light are a visual reflection of the sine waves that describe the sun's movement through the sky.

When the day's patterns are through, the performance moves on to a series composed collaboratively from all the patterns ever created. The length of the performance is a reflection of the weather and the seasons, as the shafts use up their energy and fade out late in the evening, one by one.

Photo by Gorbet Design Inc.

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

Ah, Lobbying - quite possibly the marketing activity with the highest ROI activity of all

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

via Michael Geist Blog by Michael Geist on 6/15/08

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) examines the role that U.S. pressure played leading up to the introduction of Bill C-61 last week. I argue that the bill is the result of an intense public and private campaign waged by the U.S. government to pressure Canada into following its much-criticized digital copyright model. The U.S. pressure has intensified in recent years, particularly since there is a growing international trend toward greater copyright flexibility with countries such as Japan, New Zealand, and Israel either implementing or considering more flexible copyright standards.

The public campaign was obvious. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins was outspoken on the copyright issue, characterizing Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7 (despite the World Economic Forum ranking it ahead of the U.S.). The U.S. Trade Representatives Office (USTR) made Canada a fixture on its Special 301 Watch list, an annual compilation of countries that the U.S. believes have sub-standard intellectual property laws. The full list contains nearly 50 countries accounting for 4.4 billion people or approximately 70 percent of the world's population. Most prominently, last year U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, escalated the rhetoric on Canadian movie piracy, leading to legislative reform that took just three weeks to complete.

The private campaign was even more important.

Sources say that emboldened by the successful campaign for anti-camcording legislation, U.S. officials upped the ante at the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in Montebello, Quebec last summer. Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file. Those demands were echoed earlier by the USTR, which, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, made veiled threats about "thickening the border" between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda.

Faced with unrelenting U.S. pressure, the newly installed Industry Minister was presented with a mandate letter that required a copyright bill that would meet U.S. approval. The government promised copyright reform in the October 2007 Speech from the Throne and was set to follow through last December, only to pull back at the last hour in the face of mounting public concern.

In the months that followed, Prentice's next attempt to bring the copyright bill forward was stalled by internal cabinet concerns over how the bill would play out in public. The bill was then repackaged to include the new consumer-focused provisions such as the legalization of recording television shows and the new peer-to-peer download $500 damage award. The heart of the bill, however, remained largely unchanged since satisfying U.S. pressure remained priority number one. Just after 11:00 a.m. last Thursday, the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill.

The multi-tasking virus

So true.

The multi-tasking virus

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog by nick on 6/13/08

In an essay written for Tim Ferriss's blog, Josh Waitzkin, the former chess champion who was the subject of the book and subsequent film Waiting for Bobby Fisher, writes of his recent experience in returning to his alma mater, Columbia, and sitting in on a class taught by Dennis Dalton, "the most important college professor of my life." Dalton, writes Waitzkin,

was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world. Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.

But it was the audience's reaction that left an even greater impression on Waitzkin:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation's enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

That minds wander is not news - "wandering" may well be the default setting for our brains - but the scale of it today does seem to be something new and remarkable.

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

via Wellington Financial Blog - News, Views & Purviews by Mark McQueen on 6/13/08

As InBev launches a US$46 billion hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch, the iconic Bud may no longer be sporting an American flag. That's something we long became comfortable with here in Canada, as Labatt, Molson and Sleeman have all been acquired by foreign-based brewers. ...

But unlike the U.S., these foreign acquisitions have had a particular impact in Ontario. The former Brewers Retail (now The Beer Store), you see, is owned by the very foreign firms that also own the former Labatt, Molson and Sleeman franchises. What this means is quite straightforward: the owners of The Beer Store do what's best for their brands, and the rest of the world is at the back of the bus.

To whit, when it was discovered that "walk in cooler" beer stores (Yonge and Summerhill, for example) were increasing sales of small brands such as Brick, Mill Street and Moosehead, among others, the owners switched gears. Enough with that floormap. Most new stores are now "handy pickup" type outlets (Yonge and Lawrence, for example). Most of what you see now is a sea of beer produced by the same people that own the store. Conventiently inside the front door of the handy pickup outlets are the cases of the big three (Canadian, Coors Light, Blue, Bud and Sleeman). If you want to pick something else, feel free to ask a rep. But the delightful packaging of independent brewers is largely hidden from view, just like 20 years ago when the forbidden fruit rolled out from behind a wall on metal rollers. With this change in store setup, guess what happened to the sales of independent brewers? Right back down again. The oligarchy preserved their marketshare grip, all in the name of customer convenience. At least the convenience of the customers who buy the owner's particular brand of beer.

Which begs the question, why won't the Ontario government give local brewers the same opportunity to succeed as local vintners? The fact that our beer distribution system is owned by foreigners is not entirely different than the fact that Cognos or Dofasco have gone the same route.

What is different about this situation, however, is the impact the oligarchy has on the ability for the two dozen Ontario microbrewers to flourish. Lakeport, Creemore, Upper Canada and Sleeman all had varying degrees of success, and all started out extremely small. There is a chance that Mill Street or Wellington Brewery, for example, could replicate that success.

Let's give the next generation of Brew Masters a chance, and allow them to sell their beer at grocery stores. At least for a start.

Mapping Toronto's campers

Map of the week: Where the campers are

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 6/11/08

This week's map (link) is much simpler than last week's, and to a certain extent inspired by the weekend's heat wave: the percentage of the population in the GTA that received a provincial park camping permit last year, by postal area.

Durham Region is strongly represented.

Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and especially Oshawa are full of campers, it turns out, as is the Yonge St. corridor between Richmond Hill and Newmarket. There are also outdoorsy neighbourhoods downtown, where the Ontario park system is popular in High Park, the Beaches, the U of T area and the Islands.

The GTA's most enthusiastic campers can be found in M8X, in the Bloor St. W. and the Humber area of the former city of Etobicoke, where 4.4% of the population was issued a park permit last year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources issued almost 271,000 park permits last year, of which about 74,000 went to GTA residents. About 14,000 park users came from Quebec, and 4,500 from Manitoba. Over 16,000 came from the U.S., the largest groups from New York and Michigan.

Nerd box:

This week, we're displaying most of the suburban (but not rural) communities in the GTA. There are a total of 177 postal areas displayed, with just over 2,000 individual points. With this big a map, we're pushing the limits of how many polygons GoogleMaps can display. (The issue isn't the number of polygons so much as the points it takes to display them, which is why the maps are roughly drawn.). It may take 10-15 seconds to load