04w26:1 The Canadian Election Posted June 22nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 26 number 1 (the canadian election) ——————————————————————— Outdated democracy: We vote, they rule | Don Tapscott http://tinyurl.com/2l79x “Our country’s governing model is best described as broadcast democracy. Politicians broadcast to us — initially in campaigns — through ads and TV sound bites. We get to vote. Then they broadcast to us for four more years and we get to do it again. There is no real engagement in the important decisions that affect our lives. This division of labour — we vote, they rule –dates back to Confederation. Our ancestors didn’t have the education, time, resources or communication tools to participate in the governing process. The system worked only because public-policy issues were simple and evolved at a horse-and-buggy pace. No more. Many unforeseen issues arise between elections, and it’s not credible for the government to assert that it has a voter mandate to take specific action. Moreover, governments lack sufficient in-house policy expertise on many issues. So even if a government commissions an opinion poll to discern the public’s view, the polling process doesn’t tap into the wisdom and insight that a nation’s citizens can collectively offer. With technologies such as the Internet, we can resurrect Pierre Trudeau’s vision of ‘participatory democracy,’ but this time, actually make it happen. Citizens could become involved, learning from each other, taking responsibility for their communities and country, learning from and influencing elected officials and vice versa. “ Grow up and Vote | Globe and Mail Editorial http://tinyurl.com/2mqun “Why? Some observers say political parties aren’t addressing the issues that young people care about. Others say the young find today’s politics too partisan. Still others say the domination of one or two big parties is alienating the young, and suggest a new voting system to help smaller parties. But there’s another possibility. Perhaps young people are simply too self-absorbed to bother. […] The options for voters in this election are so varied they make the head spin. On the left, the NDP’s fresh, vigorous new leader, Jack Layton, threatens to slap an inheritance tax on the rich. On the right, the brainy new leader of the united right wants to reduce taxes to U.S. levels and below. For environmentalists, the relaunched Green Party promises to decriminalize industrial hemp production and ban the export of raw logs. For those who like things as they are, the Liberals vow to stay the course. If you live in Quebec, you can even vote for a party that wants to break up the country. […] All excuses aside, there is simply no good reason for young people like him to stand on the sidelines during election time. Their stake in who governs the country after June 28 is as great as that of any other group of Canadians, and their duty as citizens no less. Rather than strike a pose of aloof detachment, Mr. Powell should grow up, get with it and get out to vote. “ Fuck the Vote | kube http://www.sophists.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=291 “You could argue that the act of casting your vote means that you have voiced your opinion and that voting is a mode of expression. My argument is that a ballot is a weak form of expression. Who sees that opinion? No one knows who I voted for unless I tell them. It’s dropped in a sealed box. It’s just another tally mark in the end. I can voice/speak my opinion on a website and have thousands of people view it in a single day. “ Better days ahead | Garnet Fraser http://tinyurl.com/yt2u9 “You might have noticed a certain demographic trend in your crowds on the campaign trail: A lot more hearing aids than iPods, more walkers than nose rings. That Canadians under 30 don’t vote is common knowledge: Only a quarter of eligible voters under 25 bothered in 2000, and less than 40 per cent of those 25 to 29. Yet youthful vigour and excitement is the image each of you strives to project and surround himself with. Despite your best efforts to remain hip to the kids, here’s the bad news: They’re pretty sure they don’t need you.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 22 June 2004 @ 4:10 PM
04w24:2 Og Caligula Posted June 8th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 24 number 2 (Oh Caligula) ——————————————————————— Bush’s Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides | Doug Thompson http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_4636.shtml “President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind. […] ‘It reminds me of the Nixon days,’ says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. ‘Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.’ […] Aides say the President gets ‘hung up on minor details,’ micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues. […] Among top officials, Bush’s inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration’s war against Iraq. The President’s abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works. “ —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 08 June 2004 @ 3:52 PM
04w24:1 Posted June 7th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 24 number 1 ——————————————————————— Truth & Beauty | Harvey Blume http://tinyurl.com/26y6s “…two Cambridge-based scientists — Felice Frankel, a research scientist at MIT, and Eric Heller, a particle physicist at Harvard — couldn’t be farther apart. While Frankel and Heller know and admire each other’s work, they take diametrically opposed positions on whether the imagery they produce is art and what its relationship is to science. […] Frankel’s insistence on — almost a fiercely protective attitude toward — scientific truth, makes her impatient with artists who ransack science for imagery and metaphor without taking time to understand it. ‘I get angry,’ she says, ‘at artists who create one-liners, who take a sentence from a textbook and make an installation out of it.’ […] When it comes to the art world, however, Heller considers himself an outsider. But he’s a savvy outsider who diagnoses art-world behavior as he might a peculiarity of particle spin. ‘The universal thing in avant-garde modern art is newness,’ he says. ‘Many artists think that if they do the next shocking thing, they’re going to be in the history books.’ His point of view is in many ways that of an aesthetic conservative, who respects beauty and traditional values that the art world in recent years has tended to treat as old-fashioned.” A bastion against cultural obscenity | Robert Hughes http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1230169,00.html “By the time I first came to live in England, and for years thereafter, the obsoleteness of the Royal Academy as a benign factor in the life of contemporary art was simply assumed as a fact. […] Nevertheless, one went to its shows, which were sometimes complete eye-openers.[…] The chance to see shows like that, I realised, was one reason why I had wanted to leave Australia in the first place. Anyway, as the years wore on, it began to seem a bit absurd to bear the Academy ill-will for things that happened in Burlington House when you were less than 10-years-old, or even not yet born. […]The idea that a revived Academy would or could clamp an iron fist of conformity on English painting and sculpture is simply absurd. It did not do that even in the 18th century. But there are quite clear and to me convincing reasons why we need such a revival today. […] An institution like the Royal Academy, precisely because it is not commercial, can be a powerful counterweight to the degrading market hysteria we have seen too much of in recent years. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between, and what else is news? I know, as most of us do in our hearts, that the term ‘avant-garde’ has lost every last vestige of its meaning in a culture where anything and everything goes. […] The scientific metaphors, like ‘research’ and ‘experiment’, that were so popular half a century ago, do not apply to art. We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures.” How to Determine the Business You’re REALLY In | Mark Federman http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/BusinessYoureReallyIn.pdf “What haven’t you noticed lately? Determining the business you’re really in requires developing an awareness of the dynamics and effects that emerge from the business when considered as a McLuhan medium. McLuhan’s Laws of Media are a particularly useful tool that provides non-judgemental clarity of perception into these effects. IBM’s initial success, loss of industry dominance and subsequent recovery is a prime example of how the company’s nominal business differs from ‘the business it’s really in’ when viewed through the McLuhan lens, an insight that is applied as well to Microsoft, Amazon.com and GroceryGateway.com. Examples of how ‘creating an culture of innovation’ requires one to use the media law of reversal to break through conventionallytrained business thinking are demonstrated among some of the most successful companies in computer software, food service and electronic component manufacturing. ‘To be able to perceive 21st century dynamics is to … change the tools with which we perceive the world and thereby restructure the way we think about our business.’” NOTE: PDF file (347K) —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 07 June 2004 @ 10:47 PM
04w23:1 Bacteria Posted June 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 23 number 2 (bacteria) ——————————————————————— Autopoiesis and the Grand Scheme | Greg Bear http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/gregbear/autopoiesis.html “…bacteria engage in sex for the sheer desperate necessary joy of it – sex is their visit to the community library, the communal cookbook. They wriggle themselves through seas of recipes, little circular bits of DNA called plasmids. […] In the very beginning, for bacteria, this was sex. This was how sex began, as a visit to the great extended library. I call this data sex. No bacterium can exist for long without touching base with its colleagues, its peers. […] In the Library of Congress, every single book, every item, began with an act of reproductive sex, allowing the author to get born and eventually to write a book. That book now acts as a kind of plasmid, reaching into your mind to alter your memory, which is the con-template — my word: the template, through cognition , of behavior. The medium of course is language. Sex is language, and language is sex, whatever form it takes. […] Like the bacteria, as social animals, we engage in communal sharing of information. We call it education, and the result is culture. The shape of our society relies on spoken and written language, the language of signs, the next level of language above the molecular. […] Culture from very early times was as much a factor in human survival as biology, and today, culture has subsumed biology. The language of signs inherent in science and mathematics has co-opted the power of molecular language. […] Unfortunately, in the ocean of empty space, we have yet to receive packets of data from other planetary cells. We are like a single bacterium squirming through a primordial sea, hoping to find others like itself, or at least find recipes and clues about what to do next. […] We send out spaceships between the planets, the stars, containing our own little recipes, our own clues, like hopeful plasmids.” The Bacteria Whisperer | Steve Silberman http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/quorum.html “The notion that microbes have anything to say to each other is surprisingly new. For more than a century, bacterial cells were regarded as single-minded opportunists, little more than efficient machines for self-replication. Flourishing in plant and animal tissue, in volcanic vents and polar ice, thriving on gasoline additives and radiation, they were supremely adaptive, but their lives seemed, well, boring. The ‘sole ambition’ of a bacterium, wrote geneticist François Jacob in 1973, is ‘to produce two bacteria.’ New research suggests, however, that microbial life is much richer: highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions. Bassler and other researchers have determined that bacteria communicate using molecules comparable to pheromones. By tapping into this cell-to-cell network, microbes are able to collectively track changes in their environment, conspire with their own species, build mutually beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria, gain advantages over competitors, and communicate with their hosts – the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria.” Article Date: April 2003 | This is a followup to a profile on Bonnie Bassler published in Scientific American earlier this year and that was part of Goodreads posting 04w3:2 —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 01 June 2004 @ 4:32 PM (
