If you are like me, then you enjoy groaning at Rosie DiManno’s columns in the Toronto Star.  I discovered something fun.  For those of you unfamiliar with Rosie DiManno, she is a columnist at the Toronto Star, and formerly of the Toronto Sun.  The columns that she writes are sensational, and chock full of cliches, suggestive language, and stuff that borders on libel.  I read her columns when I feel like I don’t have a good enough reason to pull my hair out and scream “what the devil is wrong with people?!?!?!”

I had originally sent this to a friend, but then thought I would post this here, too.

1) take the text from a column, ex http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/729370–dimanno-disdain-for-u-s-led-to-afghan-torture-fiasco;

2) paste text for Flesh-Kincaid / other readability tests at http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp;

3) read analysis and LOL. Last time I tried this out, the grade level was like 4, so the fact that the readability varies so much from column to column is rather telling.

Best: at the bottom of analyses there are suggestions under the heading “List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :” Effectively, this is a tool that auto-selects the worst parts of Rosie’s writing, and isolates them into tidbits.

Example: “That was the original sin, as has become ever more evident, because Afghanistan is nowhere near ready, all these years on from the 2001 invasion and ouster of the Taliban regime, to administer itself.”

WTF

When I was a kid, I was really into reading books about what are known as “natural disasters”, and weather.  I was always a geek.

Apparently I still am.  Lucky for me, thanks to the Internet, I can now quasi-monitor the Atlantic hurricane season, which is quite exciting.  The United States’ “National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration” (NOAA) has a website for their National Hurricane Center. It’s pretty cool.  On the main page you can see the little map that shows tropical cyclone activity.  It is update pretty frequently  I remember one day last year when I looked at a blob on the map that was marked as “high potential” for tropical cyclone formation in the next 48%, and when I checked back 5 minutes later, it was a tropical depression!!! Very neat.

It’s like you are watching the storm as it develops, except not really.  It’s really cool for me.

So, the geek that I am, this becomes my favourite website from June through November.  Check it out!!!

Hi.  It’s 2:56 AM and I’m about ready to go to sleep for a few hours, before embarking on a 14 + hour day.  Perhaps when I return from work & school I will make several pizzas.

Anyway, I realized that quite a few of my friends who have blogs read this blog frequently, and have mentioned it to me.  I also realized that I forget to read those same blogs as often as I should.  I just joined the 21st century and actually started using my Google Reader.  HOORAY.  If anyone has any blog reommendations that I should add, let me know!

I just read an online article titled “Why it’s okay for newspapers to die”. It reassures that, “[t]he loss of print newspapers is akin to the loss of the horse and buggy.” In other words, the only thing about the news that is going to change is that it will be online, instead of printed on paper.  This argument is rather technologically determinist; the author of the column makes no effort to hide this when she refers to “creative destruction”, which is basically what happens when you pair technological determinism with a laissez-faire economy (read: globalization).  I have to disagree with the comparison to the “horse and buggy” for a few reasons.

First of all, there is a big difference between people switching from horse and buggies to cars, and the Internet going online.  For one thing, when people switched from the horse and buggy to the automobile, they were merely switching forms of transportation.

I could really go out on a limb and argue that the shift from horse and buggy to automobile was helped plant the seeds for the demise of a print industry, but that would be getting a little out there.  Still, consider this little summary of suburbanization etc. 101 :  the invention of the automobile initially allowed for wealthy citizens to live in suburbs and commute to work.  This reduced urban density, somewhat.  After World War 2, when there was a great deal of wealth in Canada and the United States, a great deal of people could afford to live out in the suburbs.  There was a huge boom; lots of people could buy cars.  Communication was increasingly shifting away from being “face-to-face” and turning into something that required other forms of technology, such as the telephone.  Luckily, thanks to transportation and young boys with paper routes, newspapers could still be distributed across these large urban areas, and people could still get their news, even if they lived quite far from the centre of the city.  Exciting! Oh yes, and population density decreased further.

I’m not going to get into economics and infrastructure development, cause that’s boring….  Anyway…  If you couldn’t already figure it out, the spatial diffusion of people certainly influenced the way communications technology was developed and used.  There were new needs, so there were new solutions.  Complimenting this change was the new phenomena of media mergers, buyouts and vertical/horizontal integration.  I’m not going to get into this either, because this is my blog, and not a scholarly research paper.  This publication by the Parliament of Canada is helpful if you would like to know who owns what in Canadian media, however.

[If you don't find irony in me blogging about the death of print media, just wait till I touch on the "blogger" problem.  If you can't wait: THIS IS JUST A BLOG; DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH, AND DON'T BELIEVE ANYTHING I WRITE UNTIL YOU FIND YOUR PRIMARY SOURCES OF INFORMATION.  If you are interested in the topics of infrastructure development, technological determinism, the evolution of the mass media, or anything else I am referring to and don't have access to a good pool of information, I will be happy to provide you with some good sources of information.  Otherwise, I'm not getting into it.  Additionally, if you would do not agree with some of the facts that I claim.]

Fast forward to now, and you will find a combination of a few problems: a very large amount of the media controlled by a few companies, consolidation of resources [i.e. less reporters, but just as many/more newspapers and magazines], a less diverse group of stakeholders, and the competition of the internet.

The awesome David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne) wrote a nice entry in his online journal, expressing his concern about the decline of the newspaper institution.  David Byrne echoes what I have to say about blogs, which is that:

“Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day.”

These blogs are at least secondary sources of information, for the most part, and often link to other news sites, which link to news feeds, and so on.  Just look at what I’m writing.

Another problem with moving a newspaper from print to online the format in which the different stories are presented.   Go most online news sites and you will see the “most popular” list of stories (Vancouver Sun, Toronto Star, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.).  My completely scientific and untested opinion is going to suggest that these articles are more likely to be read than the others.  I am also going to suggest that being online is distracting; unlike sitting down and reading a newspaper, where you don’t have many other prominent sources of stimulation, reading an online newspaper puts the reader in a position to stray away from what he or she was initially planning to read.  The reader also may skip out on the shorter pieces, which can often be found tucked in with the larger stories, because there is the opportunity is not there in the same way for the eye to pass over the “smaller” headline.

Back to this horse and buggy issue: with the exception of the clown car, I do not recall reading of any sort of widespread consolidation of passengers as they left behind their horses and buggies: if there had been four buggies, all which could seat four people, the 16 of these people did not all pool together and hop into one sedan.  Yes — there were buses, but mass transportation had long existed, in the form of the boat and the train; I’m only talking about private, individual transportation.  What is happening to the media, is in some sense, an information clown car — dozens of newspapers being piled into one source of information.

CanWest is a media clown car that would make a real troupe of clowns jump for their money.  CanWest owns a frightening amount of Canadian media, and you can also find a lot of interesting research articles from over the years discussing what this means in the world of communications and democracy.

CanWest is also experiencing some MAJOR financial problems.  There have been reports that CanWest may sell some of their newspapers, magazines or television stations to other buyers; but, realistically, who would those buyers be?

The biggest question of all, however, is: what would it mean for the Canadian public if all of the newspapers printed by CanWest ceased to print, and went online?  What would happen if CanWest, as unreliable as it is, ceased to exist and we were left with only skeletons of an industry?

The title of this blog post is the name of a  film that I watched in my Urban Geography course this evening.  As far as I know, I’ve been living under a rock and everyone else has known about this documentary (made in 2004) except for me.  I had always been disenchanted by the Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth/Oil Oil Oil conspiracy stuff that has been going on for the last many years.  It’s not that I am ignorant, or against it — I just haven’t been too interested in getting all militant and obsessed about oil as some people have.  Anyway…

We watched this film in class. I would recommend people view “The Depletion of Oil and the Collapse of the American Dream”, not because I agree or disagree with its content, but because it had some thought provoking qualities.   The most impressive part about the documentary was just how prophetic it was.  Several scientists and academics make some predictions, which at the time seem unbelieveable to a global society so uneducated about what keeps their livelihoods from falling apart; and these predictions, for the most part, occurred — often, impressively, at the dates predicted.

People make predictions all the time.  I think when most predictions turn out to be fact, people are mildly entertained, or just neutral, or unaware.  Other times, obviously, the predictions are incorrect.  What stands out about what these people claimed would happen, is that they were predicting the equivilent of an apocalypse.  The inability to satisfy an overwhelming and exponential “need” for oil, for consumption, for a chaos theory kind of mob-mentality, consuming behaviour, means the death of a life that recent generations [from certain countries] feel entitled to, and inevitably leads to the loss of social cohesion and norms.  Most of the speakers in this film didn’t go so far as to predict a dissolution of any sort of social contract, but they do insinuate it.

So, pretty crazy stuff.

What I did take issue with, is that this film is, as can be expected, one-sided.  Obviously a film that is attempting to plead, intelligently, to the public, and to the slightly-above-layman audience that it needs to collectively WAKE THE FUCK UP and change if you want your children to see tomorrow is not going to present a lot of counter-arguments.  Fair enough.  I think anyone intelligent enough to watch this film (it’s pretty easy to follow, but not for Cletus) with an open mind can understand that it is one sided, and has a clear agenda.

Having said that, I study arts and social sciences.  I consider myself adequately educated in these areas, and can understand concepts.  However, I do not understand much about physical sciences; so, when the scientists in this film say that it takes more energy to create hydrogen power than it does to use it, or that such and such uses up so much oil, or that something is scientifically ineffecient, that isn’t good enough for me.  I would like, at least, a brief background to explain to the uneducated viewer in me: “this is why this is like THIS”.  It is important to recognize your audience, and this film obviously was not made for scientists.  If this film had been made for scientists, I would not have understood half of what was in it (or any of it?)  This film was made for people like me, like the general audience I referred to above, and most of us are not highly educated about these topics.  This film is like “Oil Mear-Mongering 101″, which is why it is so easy to watch.

Bottom few lines: Movie:

-interesting and thought provoking. Check it out!

- freakishly prophetic

- lacked empirical data for the physical scientifically uneducated geek in me.

Good night.

Hello Internets,

In contrast to recent discussions of dystopian cities of Gamblor and my disdainful fascination with the mainstream media’s coverage of various phenomena, I would like to “plug”, if you will, a website/blog/podcast.

Some fine gentlemen in Toronto, Tim (and contributing geek, Brad) have a blog called “Comma Error”.  Tim has done a bunch of reviews of recent video games, and dude knows his video game shit.  Tim and Brad also have started doing a podcast, which is pretty entertaining.  So check it out.

Also, now I shall plug myself, for the millionth time today: plug plug plug. For those who haven’t heard me brag about something that isn’t totally extraordinary:  I was accepted into UBC today and offered the President’s Entrance Scholarship.  It’s nothing too fancy; just based on academic merit, but I am still stoked.  I still have someone else’s money paying for my schooling, as a recognition of my brain power.  Woooooooo.