'The next election will be a choice between a coalition government … or a stable Conservative majority government'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 131 Comments

Fewer respondents than four years ago are completely comfortable with the prospect of a Conservative majority government—34% in 2007, 26% in 2011. If you combine the currently comfortable with the slightly comfortable and the uncomfortable with slightly uncomfortable, you get a tie—48% to 47.9%.

Add those figures as you see fit to previous attempts to poll Canadians on hypothetical options.

Saskatchewan threatening to pull plug on stadium

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 1:46 PM - 5 Comments

The provincial government in Saskatchewan says that unless Ottawa agrees to shell out for a $430-million stadium in Regina by the end of February, the project will have to be abandoned. The province applied for federal funding last June to help build a facility that would replace Mosaic Stadium, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders. MLA Ken Cheveldayoff, the minister responsible for the facility, has made the request under the new deadline to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, saying that the land agreement with CP Rail at the proposed site is about to lapse. Saskatchewan joins Quebec, Hamilton and Halifax on the list of cities asking for federal funding for new stadiums.

CTV News

Canadians more concerned than Americans about climate policy

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 62 Comments

A new poll conducted by U.S. and Canadian think tanks and released by Public Policy Forum and Sustainable Prosperity shows the Harper government might want to rethink its laissez-faire approach to climate change policy. It found 80 per cent of Canadians believe the science behind climate change, as opposed to 58 per cent of Americans. In Canada, 65 per cent think the government has a role to play in addressing climate change, while only 43 per cent of Americans believe their federal government has a responsibility to address the issue. Twice as many Canadians as Americans are also willing to pay the price of a carbon tax, according to the poll. “Canadians continue to believe in very high numbers that climate change is a significant issue,” said Sustainable Prosperity’s Alex Wood. “They want to see federal leadership on the issue in terms of a policy regime that will set the course for Canada.”

CBC News

Nunavut: home of the $19 jar of Cheez Whiz

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 1:03 PM - 21 Comments

Residents of Canada’s Far North are dealing with a staggering rise in the price of sugar, canned goods, toilet paper, and nearly every other basic staple of life. The price hikes are due to a change to the way the federal government finances the cost of shipping grocery items to northern communities. Ottawa used to fund the cost of sending all essential grocery items to the North. But, as of last October, the program became limited to non-perishable food items after a study commissioned in 2008 found the program expensive and inefficient. The end result has been a whopping increase in the price of virtually everything. According to a report in La Presse, in Puvirnituq, Nunavika, a 2 kg bag of sugar currently sells for $14,74; in Kuujjuaq, the same can of tomato juice which used to cost a hefty $5.42 now goes for $8.51; meanwhile, in Nunavut, a jar of peanut butter will run you $17.69.

La Presse

The video that had Stephen Harper in stitches

By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 12:52 PM - 7 Comments

Youtube

Constituents get a surprise call
A handful of high-profile Conservatives, including John Baird, Lawrence Cannon, James Moore and Lisa Raitt, ensured that Bill C-389, which adds gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act, passed last week. The bill, introduced by NDP MP Bill Siksay, is now at  the Senate. For Raitt it was personal: the labour minister has a transgendered cousin. She also quips that without transgendered women she wouldn’t be able to find shoes. The minister wears size 11. MPs received mixed messages over the issue. NDP MP Peter Stoffer said he got the same the-sky-is-falling response as when he voted for same-sex marriage. Long-time heterosexual couples, he said, called him in a panic, claiming the institution of marriage would be destroyed. Stoffer asked them at the time how their families were doing and whether they had children and grandchildren. Several years later Stoffer made a point of calling them back to ask how their families were and if the passing of the same-sex marriage bill had had any adverse affects. After recovering from the shock of the call, all admitted their marriages were still going strong.

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

The ‘Badger’ has left the building
Last week was Toronto Star reporter Richard Brennan’s last day on the Hill. Four years ago he was elected president of the press gallery because of his reputation for verbally pummelling politicians. (His nickname was “Badger.”) He told Capital Diary that when it came to access, covering Ottawa was like the Third World and things have only gotten worse. Brennan says the irony in Stephen Harper’s lack of media availability is that the PM is really good when he does engage journalists. Brennan was frustrated that cabinet meeting times were not made available, as had been done before, which further cut media off from information on the country’s decision makers. Based on his previous experience as a reporter covering Ontario politics, he says don’t expect to see any additional access if another party takes power: “Once you lose these things you never get them back.”

Continue…

Democracy by YouTube

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 45 Comments

An anonymous Conservative MP posits one way a little girl singing a Lady Gaga song might be considered more relevant than the basic tenets of parliamentary democracy.

“The public outside of blind partisans is not listening – 22,000 people have signed [the Liberals’] little petition while 10 million have listened to the little girl from Winnipeg cover a Lady Gaga song over a shorter period of time (she’s very good by the way),” the Tory argued. “It’s a sad statement when joining a petition is a click and they point to 22,000 people signing up as something significant,” the MP added. “People calling the office or sending an e-mail, that indicates a groundswell and support, like the [usage-based Internet billing] issue which flooded the office a couple of weeks ago.”

The Prime Minister’s Office uploads Mr. Harper’s speeches to YouTube as well and the most watched of those—with 10,198 views—is his address to the nation when his government was nearly toppled in December 2008. For the sake of comparison, and using the same math, all of the following videos are immensely more relevant than whatever the Prime Minister had to say that night. Continue…

Gadhafi’s forces crack down on protesters

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 3 Comments

After the Libyan government’s brutal crackdown of anti-government protests over the weekend, pro-Gadhafi gunmen are roaming the deserted streets of Tripoli, with reports of gunmen opening fire on a bread line in the Fashloum district on Tuesday, killing three. Government officials sent out a text message ordering public servants and other workers back to work, but most were reportedly too afraid to go out into the streets. More uprisings have been reported in the western towns of Misurata, Sabratha and Zawiya. At least 300 people have died so far, but as reports are difficult to verify and more bodies litter the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi, the body count is expected to be much higher.

BBC News

Canada's worst spenders

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:57 AM - 7 Comments

There’s been plenty of speculation that Vancouver’s hot housing market is in bubble territory, and as interest rates rise, that view is going to be put to the test. A new Toronto-Dominion Bank report says that one in 10 British Columbia households could find themselves scrambling to pay their bills if the Bank of Canada ups rates, as TD predicts it will—up to three per cent by the end of 2012.

The province has been Canada’s real estate debt champion since at least 1999, and it is the only one where the average savings rate is negative, according to TD. Vancouver in particular seems to most resemble the housing run-up seen in the U.S. Two weeks ago, Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University who correctly forecast the U.S. housing bust and helped develop the influential Standard and Poor’s Case-Shiller real estate index, likened Vancouver to San Francisco, one of the areas worst hit by the slump in the States. Compare that to Manitoba, where families have strengthened their balance sheets since 2006, and will be putting 40 per cent less of every dollar toward debt repayments than households in B.C., notes TD. Continue…

The new widow's handbook

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

Nicolas Guerin/Contour/Getty Images

On Feb. 15, 2008, three days before her husband Raymond Smith died, Joyce Carol Oates returned to the car she’d parked haphazardly in her rush to visit him in the hospital. On the windshield was this message: “LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH” (sic). Though crazed with worry over her spouse of 48 years, the acclaimed author had the perspicacity to notice the spelling error and take a lesson from the rebuke, as she recounts in her magnificent memoir A Widow’s Story: “The Widow-to-be, like the Widow, is made to realize that her situation, however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn’t give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others, especially strangers who know nothing of her.”

Such sensitive, sharp insights fibrillate through Oates’s new book, an engrossing cri de coeur that traces her nightmarish dislocation from fulfilled, happy wife to devastated, unmoored widow. “I can’t let Ray down,” she writes, as she struggles to organize his estate: “This is my responsibility as his wife. I mean, his widow.”

Inevitable comparisons will be made with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. A Widow’s Story is far more raw, poetic, blackly funny—and practical. She wrote it in 2009, drawing upon her journal and emails, in a bid to be helpful, Oates says on the telephone from Berkeley, Calif. “It’s the only incident in my whole life where I felt I was representative of other people. My experience of being a writer, a teacher seemed entirely my own.” The widow’s experience is shockingly impersonal, the 72-year-old says: “There’s so much you need to do. And no one prepares you.” Some advice might seem trivial, like “always put your keys in the same place.” But it’s crucial, Oates says: “You lose everything; your concentration is so scattered.” One tip arose from her cat peeing on Smith’s death certificate: “MAKE DUPLICATE COPIES OF THE DEATH CERTIFICATE. MANY!”

The widow’s reality can be absurd, even surreal, Oates writes: “Do not think that grief is pure, solemn, austere and elevated—this is not Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Think instead of Spike Jones, those unfunny ‘classical’ music jokes involving tubas.” She was particularly horrified by a deluge of “sympathy” baskets of gourmet fare bearing the warning: “Decorative mosses should not be eaten,” a directive inspiring her tart rejoinder: “A widow may be deranged but a widow is not that deranged.” Oates says she made the scene funny but that the experience was depressing: “My house was filling up with flowers as if it was some sort of celebration. It was so unintentionally cruel.”

What kept her going, even as she contemplated suicide, was being a “professional person” who met commitments: “If I said, ‘I can cancel now; I’m a widow, I can just go to bed,’ then one thing after another would go downward—even though I wanted to do that.”
Others’ good intentions could be hurtful, she writes: “I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed: YES MY HUSBAND HAS DIED/YES I AM VERY SAD/YES YOU ARE KIND TO OFFER CONDOLENCES/NOW CAN WE CHANGE THE SUBJECT?” Tact is required: “Don’t say ‘Are you lonely?’ Or ‘What can we do?’ The widow doesn’t want fussing.” What is helpful to the widow, she says, are good friends who bring food or drive her someplace or who say, “Let’s go to a movie.”

Advice Oates didn’t include in the book, but wishes she had, is to say “yes” to invitations. That’s how she met neuroscientist and fellow Princeton professor Charles Gross in August 2008 at a dinner party. “A friend thought it would be nice for these two lonely people to get together,” she says, recalling their meeting fondly: “It wasn’t a Heathcliff, wild kind of thing. He brought the pizza.”

They married the following spring. “I wasn’t looking for a husband,” Oates says. “It was this particular person.” But she likes being married, she admits: “I love being a housewife.” Gross, who has suffered his own losses, was attuned to her grief. “Charlie said to me: ‘I’m not Ray; I’m not taking his place. I’m very different,’ ” she says, adding: “But he’s not all that different. What was important is that he understood.”

The making of a Loyalist

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Rich, white, virulently anti-democratic, and more British than the British. The United Empire Loyalists, those colonials who stuck by the British Crown during the American Revolution and who afterwards fled to what would become Canada, still suffer from a certain image problem. And that’s here, where as English Canada’s founding fathers, they have been long celebrated by nationalistic historians, made into bulwarks of the classic Canadian whatever-we-are-we-are-not-Americans mindset. Everywhere else the Loyalists went in the British Empire—the Caribbean, Africa, India, Britain itself—they were largely forgotten. But nowhere was that more true than in the land of their birth. When the revolution ended in 1783, 60,000 Loyalists and their 15,000 slaves crammed on to Royal Navy vessels and sailed out of New York, Savannah and Charleston. And sailed out, too, from American historical consciousness, which has never liked to dwell on the civil war aspect of the War of Independence.

A new understanding of the Loyalists has started to emerge lately, though, especially through the works of American historians taking a fresh look at their country’s origins. Such books as Alan Taylor’s provocatively titled The Civil War of 1812 (2010) and Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff’s just-released Liberty’s Exiles, the first global study of the revolution’s losing side, offer Canadians an arrestingly foreign portrait of our founders. And of their widely varied backgrounds.

Among the extraordinary individuals featured in Jasanoff’s work are two ex-slaves, David George and George Liele. “I continue to be struck,” Jasanoff says in an interview, “how little the non-white component of the Loyalists is known in the U.S.” Those 15,000 slaves were, naturally, of African descent, but the 60,000 free exiles—two-thirds of whom came to Canada—included more than 2,000 Mohawk allies, and 8,000 free blacks. The latter were survivors of the 20,000 slaves, including some owned by George Washington, who had fled patriot owners for the British promise of emancipation for those who took up arms for the king.

Continue…

Gadhafi ordered Lockerbie bombing, says former Libyan minister

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:04 AM - 23 Comments

Well, that would explain it. Even after renouncing terrorism, Moammar Gadhafi wouldn’t rest until he’d sprung Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Scotland that killed 270 people. Now, as Gadhafi’s grip on power slips, and his methods turn brutal, his ex-justice minister is saying the Libyan president personally ordered the bombing. The Swedish tabloid Expressen quotes Mustafa Abdel-Jalil saying he has proof that “Gadhafi gave the order about Lockerbie,” though he doesn’t specify what sort of proof. “To hide it, he [Gadhafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil apparently told the paper.

CBC News

TVO Opens Up the Archives

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 2 Comments

Big news today for fans of the past of Canadian TV — or the past of cinema, for that matter — as TVOntario has opened up “The Public Archive,” a collection of selected episodes from its 40 years of existence.

There are two episodes of “The Polka Dot Door,” five of “Today’s Special,” and a good selection of Mark Askwith’s cult series “Prisoners of Gravity,” an educational show that made the most of the connections between science fiction and real-world issues. There are news and interview shows, like Mike McManus interviewing the likes of William F. Buckley and the Margarets (Laurence and Atwood), and Richard Ouzounian’s late ’90s interview show “Dialogue.”

The thing I’m personally most happy about is that TVO has liberated some of Elwy Yost’s interviews from “Talking Film.” Plus two in-studio interviews from “Saturday Night At the Movies,” including one with John Candy, most of which he does in character as Dr. Tongue from SCTV.

I’ve gone into this before, but briefly: Yost built up one of the best collections of interviews with figures from classic cinema, not just actors and directors, but technicians and producers as well. Yost was not a penetrating interviewer and didn’t try to be, but he’d ask a question and then let the guy talk while the 16 mm film cameras recorded him, and then the show would play back the interviews with very few cuts. (Today, this type of interview will normally be broken into smaller segments, which is part of the reason these interviews can no longer be seen in full on TV.) It takes time to clear the rights to these interviews, which is why most of them haven’t been online even though TVO no longer shows them, but now a selection of them can be found in these archives. Seeing and hearing these people talk at length, almost uninterrupted, can require some patience depending on who’s talking, but it’s worth it; it’s a cinema-history education in a way that selected clips can’t be.

Here for example is his show on Powell and Pressburger (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), the greatest filmmaking team in British cinema, including interviews with P&P themselves and their stars and cinematographer.

[vodpod id=Video.5633022&w=640&h=350&fv=videoId%3D180330207001%26amp%3BplayerID%3D63470006001%26amp%3BplayerKey%3DAQ%7E%7E%2CAAAABDk7A3E%7E%2CxYAUE9lVY98sZuR8hPqcKW53BLxRuCch%26amp%3Bdomain%3Dembed%26amp%3BdynamicStreaming%3Dtrue]

There’s a lot more there, including his show on Daryl F. Zanuck, where Henry Fonda recalls what it was like being under contract to Fox: “It was hell.”

The House: Other ideas

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 10:21 AM - 50 Comments

In writing about the House of Commons, I touched on one idea for reform: amending the Elections Act to take away the party leader’s say over who can and cannot run under a party’s banner, but that was just one of several suggestions I heard in talking with MPs for the piece.

Herein, a brief overview of what else could be done. Continue…

Another CEO scandal?

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 3 Comments

Though Wall Street CEOs have routinely denied being aware of the risks that led up to the 2008 financial crisis, a new U.S. study suggests otherwise. Sanjai Bhagat at the University of Colorado and Brian Bolton at the University of New Hampshire looked at the compensation of executives at the 14 largest U.S. financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, in the period between 2000 and 2008. Focusing on CEOs’ trading of their banks’ stock, the academics found that executives were 30 times more likely to sell than to buy. One would expect confident CEOs to hold on to their shares, or even buy more. What’s more, the dollar value of those sales were about 100 times the value of open market buys.

These trends suggest the executives also did not believe in the risks their banks were taking­. Worse still, Bolton and Bhagat say the CEOs turned a profit, what they called “the net CEO payoff,” because their earnings were greater than the value that shares lost in 2008 by US$649 million. The authors argue such bad behaviour could be curbed by a compensation model that gives executives restricted stock options. Instead of buying and selling any time, CEOs would have to hold their shares for up to four years after their last day in office.

Suffering from hunger pains

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 2 Comments

Paul van Riel/Hollandse Hoogte/REDUX

North Korea is reportedly importing animal feed from China for human consumption. And in a sign of just how desperate the reclusive regime is, the poor-quality feed is being fed to its powerful military forces, amid reports soldiers are deserting to forage for food. Civilians are even more vulnerable to food shortages: the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates a third of the population is undernourished, and last week a WFP spokesman reported North Korea had a “severe winter and a poor vegetable harvest.” Compounding the problem, Pyongyang just confirmed an outbreak of foot-and-mouth-disease. To stop the virus’s spread, animals have to be killed and buried ahead of this year’s rice planting, yet another blow for a nation dependent on oxen for plowing.

Through its embassies, the now “frantic” nuclear power is appealing directly to foreign governments for food aid. (In November the WFP announced it raised only one-fifth of the funding needed for its operations there.) However, with world food prices rising and nations increasingly resistant to North Korea’s erratic and bellicose demands, Pyongyang has received few offers of help.

China: the global superpower of green

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 9:04 AM - 49 Comments

Siu Chiu/Reuters

Last year, China walked away from the Copenhagen climate change summit as a villain. It had shot down any attempts to introduce binding carbon emission targets. Chinese diplomats even insisted on taking off the table emission cuts meant only for advanced economies, reportedly sending then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd banging his microphone on the table as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel threw her arms up in despair.

Yet, for all the anger it provoked, China is now the world’s leader in green energy investment. Beyond the pollution and the black smoke rising from its coal plants, there are labs working on advanced battery technology, manufacturing plants pumping out solar panels, and fields of wind turbines. Five years ago, China pledged to cut emissions by 10 per cent, and by the end of 2010, it announced it had reached the target. In 2009, China shelled out $34.4 billion for clean energy, nearly double the $18.5 billion spent by the United States, and more than 10 times what Canada forked out, according to the Pew Charitable Trust, a non-profit based in Washington. In short, “China won this round of the race for clean energy,” says Ang Li, a Greenpeace campaigner based in Beijing. And, she adds, the country is well-positioned to become the next superpower of green.

Since 2006, Beijing has been sending a “stable political signal to develop clean energy,” says Li. But the politburo’s drive to plant windmills and set up solar panels is not a crusade against global warming—China is still the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The government’s main concern is energy security, says Dickon Pinner, a partner at McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm. Faced with the scenario that its energy demands will double by 2030, Chinese officials are scrambling to promote efficiency and diversify away from coal, which now accounts for 70 per cent of the country’s energy supply. The push for green energy is also part of China’s effort to develop global leaders in high-growth, technology-intensive sectors, says Pinner. Finally, Chinese leaders seem to care little about things like the health of polar bears and the state of the ice caps, but Pinner says that they are eager to alleviate domestic water and air pollution.

Continue…

The king's (totally crazy) speech: selections from Gadhafi's address

By Alex Derry - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 4:39 PM - 19 Comments

On Tuesday, Moammar Gadhafi addressed Libyans on state television while his security forces waged a pitched and violent battle against anti-government protesters on the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi. Gadhafi, always up for a good ramble, didn’t disappoint. His remarks—all 73 minutes of them—were typically incoherent and contradictory. If the reality on the ground weren’t so serious—hundreds killed; complete civil collapse—they might even be funny.

ON GRATITUDE:

“Those who want glory should remember the evacuation of the Americans, and the Great [Manmade] River, and the return of oil in Libya, and the nationalization of companies. Now 90 per cent of these companies you own, and only 10 per cent are owned by foreign [agents].”

ON HOW HE WILL NOT USE FORCE—UNLESS HE USES FORCE, WHICH WOULD BE ALLOWED UNDER THE CONSTITUTION HE INVENTED:

“We will not use force again. The force is on the side of the Libyan people. If matters require the use of  force, we will use force according to international law and according to Libyan laws and [the] constitution.”

ON WHO’S IN CHARGE:

“If I had the position, if I were the president, I would have resigned. I would have thrown my resignation in your face. But I have no position, no post. I have nothing to resign from. I have my gun, my rifle to fight for Libya.”

“Moammar Gadhafi is not the president, he is the leader of the revolution.”

“I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents…I will die as a martyr at the end.”

ON SOBRIETY AS VIRTUE:

“A small group of young people who have taken drugs have attacked police stations like mice… They have taken advantage of this peace and stability. However it is not their fault, these young people; they tried to imitate what happened in Tunisia … However there is a small group of sick people that has infiltrated cities that are circulating drugs and money.”

ON KEEPING A COOL HEAD:

“Leave your homes and attack them in their lairs. They are taking your children and getting them drunk and sending them to death. For what? To destroy Libya, burn Libya.”

“I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired…when I do, everything will burn.”

ON WHAT’S AT STAKE:

“Do you want America to occupy you, like Afghanistan and Iraq?”

ON THE APPARENT HEALTH BENEFITS OF EMPLOYING A VOLUPTUOUS UKRAINIAN NURSE:

“Moammar Gadhafi is not a normal person that you can poison.. or lead a revolution against”

ON HOW PROTESTS ARE PASSÉ:

“They are just imitating Egypt and Tunisia.”

Explaining Peter MacKay

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 4:19 PM - 91 Comments

Kathryn Blaze Carlson profiles the Defence Minister.

Mr. Pearson said he believes that Mr. MacKay’s “hands are tied,” and that if the minister was “free to be less partisan, he would.” He said the minister last year reached out to discuss future military deployments — proving Mr. MacKay’s willingness, he said, to include opposition MPs in his decision-making. “If we were in a different kind of House of Commons, under Brian Mulroney or Joe Clark, for example, I think Peter MacKay would be more in his element,” Mr. Pearson said. “I think he would come into his own.”

The coolest invention this year! (was invented two years ago)

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 3:28 PM - 16 Comments

I’ve written before about my preference for cheap, ubiquitous tech over flashy and expensive gadgets. The exclusivity of pricey next-level gizmos actually detracts from their usefulness and prevents strong user/developer communities from forming (iPad, anyone?). With that in mind, I dreamed about tablet computers becoming as cheap and ubiquitous as USB keys. Turns out, I should have dreamed bigger.

Thanks to Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab, screens themselves could be rendered irrelevant. Or rather—when walls, sheets of paper, or even your hands can be used as screens, then cheap becomes free and computing takes a great leap forward. All is explained in this amazing TED talk. Take the time to watch the whole thing, you won’t be disappointed:

[ted id=685]

Screenlessness may be just the beginning—Mistry’s invention integrates physical and digital space in a way that strikes me as a solution to some fundamental limitations in computing. What might app developers build around such an intuitive computer?  It’s fun just to imagine the possibilities.

I’m particularly inspired by Mistry’s sheer ingenuity—SixthSense is not the product of a genius math-whiz or a triumph of computer engineering—it seems more like a homemade mashup of existing cheap devices, a puzzle Mistry solved through imagination. The whole thing left me gobsmacked. And I was gobsmacked once again when I checked the date on the talk—it’s two years old!

So what happened with SixthSense? Or, more hopefully—what’s happening? Why doesn’t everyone have one of these ingenuous, cheap, wearable devices? Has Mistry opened SixthSense up to open source development as promised? What does the mainstream consumer electronics industry think about this—is it a threat or an opportunity?

I’ll try to answer these questions this week, and I’ve reached out to Mistry himself. Stay tuned, and perhaps we’ll find out why we’re still waiting for yesterday’s technology.

TV: Ending 10 Minutes Early

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 2:42 PM - 5 Comments

I haven’t caught up with this week’s Chuck, but I did watch last week’s Charlie’s Angels tribute, “Chuck vs. the Cat Squad.” Allowing for the fact that the show has been in decline for a while and that it has never figured out how to solve any of the myriad problems it has always had (endless ‘shipping of two leads who have no chemistry, not enough for Adam Baldwin to do; insane overuse of wacky comedy background music), I kind of enjoyed it, as I usually enjoy the show’s tributes to cheesy action/spy stuff of the past. Or rather, I enjoyed it for the first few acts, and then…

…with one act left to go, the plot was over. Not the arc plots, not the emotional and romantic issues, which were dealt with in the final act, but the actual defeating of the bad guys. That was basically wrapped up with one entire act left to go.

I’ve seen Chuck do this before, and other shows too. (If Alias had a mission of the week, there was no telling how early it might be wrapped up.) It’s always bothered me, though I’m not sure it should. What it violates, of course, is the old storytelling rule that you should not wrap everything up too early. Chuck sometimes uses the last act the way the real Charlie’s Angels used the Continue…

Quebec orders lawyers back to work

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 2:36 PM - 8 Comments

Quebec’s legislature has ordered picketing Crown prosecutors to return to work after a two-week strike brought the provincial judicial system to a standstill. The government has imposed a six per cent raise over the next five years, but the province’s 1,500 lawyers and prosecutors say their wages are 40 per cent below the national average. Four senior Crown prosecutors and 24 deputies have resigned, though the province has refused to accept their resignations. The back-to-work order passed in the legislature with a 61-50 vote on Tuesday morning.

The Globe and Mail

Beer patriotism

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 101 Comments

On the occasion of National Flag Day last week, Conservative backbencher Jeff Watson celebrated everything that Canada has to be proud of from the last fifty years—managing in the process, either with or without irony, to both damn and confirm Mr. Ignatieff’s observation of some years ago.

Mr. Speaker, it was not the flag in days of yore; not Wolfe’s flag, nor Sir John A.’s. It was not the flag of Vimy or Passchendaele. It was not even the flag of Mr. Diefenbaker. Yet it is “our emblem dear.” When we welcomed the world at Expo in 1967, when we won the 1972 series against the Soviet Union, when we set a Winter Olympic record for gold medals last year in Vancouver, it was our flag.

We are proud to be here representing Canadians under our single red maple leaf raised 46 years ago. Well, most of us are proud. One MP, however, has said, and I quote: In the case of the Canadian flag, I cannot entirely forget that it is both my flag and a passing imitation of a beer label.

The Liberal leader should be ashamed of himself. We should all be proud to celebrate Flag Day. As one company said, “I am Canadian.”

Earthquake rocks New Zealand’s South Island

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 12:26 PM - 2 Comments

More than 100 people are feared dead in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand following a 6.3-magnitude earthquake. Rescue workers are working to save people trapped under the rubble, but so far, at least 65 people have been confirmed dead, as a series of aftershocks continued to shake the city of 400,000. Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker has declared a state of emergency and ordered people to evacuate the city. It is the second tremor in six months to hit the city, and the worst natural disaster to hit New Zealand in 80 years.

BBC News

Bad review? The French have a remedy

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 9 Comments

On March 3, three judges in the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, adjudicating a law that views attacks on personal honour as criminal assault, will issue their ruling as to whether an academic book review written in English by a German professor in New York about a book written in English by an author living in Israel, and published by a Dutch firm defamed the book’s author. The author who brought the complaint, Karin Calvo-Goller, at least, is a French citizen.  Calvo-Goller, a senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law and Business in Israel and the author of The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court, thought the review—a technical and mild., if condescending piece by Thomas Weigend, a law professor at the University of Cologne—said the review “may cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion.”

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