Tagged: CBC Radio
Davis wastes first Massey lecture
Pop anthropologist Wade Davis, the first of whose CBC Radio Massey lectures¹ just ended in the Atlantic time zone, obviously has a lot of knowledge to impart about the Earth’s diverse human cultures. So why did her waste a good half of the opening talk shooting racist fish in a 19th Century barrel? Davis’s point was that the errant 19th Century “science” of physical anthropology dripped with colonial arrogance, but the thinly disguised subtext seemed to be Davis’s own moral superiority to these imperial prigs.
The effect was both distasteful and boring, like listening a 21st Century astrophysicist satirize the Ptolemaic conceit of Earth as center of the universe. Yes, Wade, we know the Earth is not flat, and brown-skinned people are not inferior. Congratulations. Can we move on please? Ironically, toward the end of his lecture, Davis himself slipped into a bit of 19th Century noble savage romanticism.
The thesis of Davis’s Massey lectures—that Earth’s myriad cultures are “humanity’s greatest legacy… the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species”—holds promise. Now that Davis has flashed his credentials as an enlightened egalitarian, let’s hope the remaining four talks deliver on it.
¹ I cannot link to the audio file, because the Ideas’ producers have not seen fit to post it. Why is it that Ideas, the CBC show that could benefit most from the time-shifting and archiving potential of streaming audio, has been among the slowest to adopt it?
A shocking coywolf attack in Cape Breton – updated
A very sad update: The woman attacked by two coywolves succumbed to her injuries overnight. Deepest sympathy to her family and friends for their unimaginable loss.
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The shocking news that a 19-year-old Toronto-area woman was attacked and “very, very seriously” injured by a pair of coyotes in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park this afternoon will undoubtedly focus attention on recent reports that Eastern Coyotes are in fact a hybrid of coyotes and wolves, or coywolves.
We offer heartfelt hopes for a speedy and complete recovery for the unidentified woman, who was hiking on the popular and well used Skyline Trail north of Cheticamp—a trail Contrarian has often hiked with family and friends. The injured woman has been airlifted to Halifax, where she is in critical condition. RCMP officers who happened to be nearby came to her assistance. They shot and apparently wounded one of the animals; however both escaped into the woods.
CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks recently interviewed Dr. Roland Kays, Curator of Mammals at New York State Museum, about genetic testing he carried out on coyotes in that state, indicating that, as they moved east, coyotes interbred with remnant wolf populations:
Coyotes are a newcomer to Nova Scotia, the earliest confirmed specimin having been taken in Guysborough in 1977. The 30- to 50-pound Eastern Coyote is larger and darker than its western cousin, and typically occupies woodlands, not the grassy habitat favored by pure coyotes.
Kays found that the head and jaw of the coywolf are better adapted for taking down the white tailed deer that flourish here. In effect, as the coyote took over the wolf’s ecological niche in eastern North America, it became part-wolf.
The Knight Science Journalism Tracker has links to more stories about the coywolf, including articles from AAAS Science Now, Discovery, and Scientific American.
Canadian Press quotes Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources spokesman Don Anderson as saying a young Ontario girl was bitten several years ago on the Skyline Trail. “That coyote was put down and sent away for testing and it came back negative for rabies or anything like that,” he said.
Hat tip: SP.
CBC Radio iPhone app finds the Maritimes
The CBC Radio iPhone app has finally been updated, and now includes live streams from Halifax (and Fredericton and Saint John, but not Sydney or Charlottetown), and from at least one location in every Canadian time zone.
The app allows on-demand access to many good CBC Radio shows, but alas, only to “highlights” of Ideas, whose producers have for some reason been glacially slow to grasp the importance of the Internet’s time-shifting potential for this program.
Hat tip: Scott Gillard.
CBC Radio’s iPhone app finds Nova Scotia (pretty soon)
CBC is awaiting approval from Apple for an update to the terrific CBC Radio iPhone app. The updated version, which should appear on iTunes soon, will include live streams of CBC stations Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, Fredericton, Grand Falls, Moncton, Ottawa, Regina, Saint John, St John’s, Thunder Bay, Windsor, and Winnipeg. (Can Sydney be far behind?)
The original app (free download here) did not include any streams from the Mountain, Central, or Newfoundland time zones, and only Goose Bay in the Atlantic zone. Stations in the missing locations streamed in Windows Media format, which the app could not handle. As stations switch to MP3 streaming, they can be added to the app via updates like the one that’s pending.
In areas with marginal radio reception, but good WiFi or cell signals, the app beats the hell out of radio. You can time-shift effortlessly to catch an interview you missed, and you can hear many CBC programs on demand. You can do this on your computer as well, though less easily, but not in a car or out walking.
Or maybe you’re doing a breathtakingly crappy job – updated
Introducing Globe and Mail columnist and CTV host Jane Taber on a CBC panel today, Sunday Edition host Michael Enright said the following:
She is often accused by Tories of being a Liberal, and by Liberals of being a Tory, which means she is doing her job.
This canard is so common among journalists as to qualify as hackneyed. If both sides in a dispute criticize you, you much be striking the right balance. But there is an obvious alternative explanation: You could be doing such a crappy job that all sides find something to attack in your work.
Let me be clear that Contrarian is not offering a criticism of Ms. Taber, but of the smug imperviousness to criticism that pervades journalism.
A journalist friend responds:
The quote is glib, for sure. But if it’s accurate – that is, if Mr E. or the producer who wrote the script could actually attribute it to Grit & Tory sources – there’s the possible corollary that politicians from at least two parties assume that critical reportage or comment can only be partisan and not disinterested.
Good point. Politicians, take heed. But as for journalists, it’s a dangerous conceit to mark criticism as evidence of a job well done. It can be that. It can be the opposite.
Moral panic: computer memory is bad for you! – rebuttal
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose interview on Spark was the subject of a somewhat testy post on Contrarian yesterday, has returned fire.
I saw your blog entry on my interview with CBC and my book “Delete”. From your entry it is obvious that you have not read the book. [True.] That’s perfectly fine – except that you then move to render a flawed judgment on the book.
To start with, the example that I used in the interview is not about photographic memory, but about a biological condition of a very small number of people who cannot forget – or at least remember a great deal more than average humans. Photographic memory is very different – and susceptible to Dan Schacter’s “seven sins of memory”.
Contrary to what you seem to insinuate I have not blamed Google for Andrew Feldmar’s difficulties; rather I used his case to highlight the fact that with the help of the digital tools that surround us institutions and organizations can now – at very low cost – store and retrieve massive amounts of information about others. In the informational privacy literature this has been well described as potentially leading to power imbalances, which it is argued ought to worry us.
However, in my book – as well as in the interview! – I make clear that my major concern has to do with how humans perceive time, and place information in a temporal context; it is this central element, linked to research of cognitive psychologists that your blog entry misses.
Thus, your judgment that I am guilty of category error is simply incorrect – especially since the central message of the book is emphatically not that technology is to blame, or could provide a simple solution, but that changes in human behavior facilitated by information economics and technological change have made us forget remembering, and that it will take us humans to reset this balance.
In the spirit of fact-based discussion, perhaps you might be even interested in reading the book?
It’s true that I did not read the book, nor did I purport to have done so. My post explicitly responded to the interview, and mentioned the book only by way of introductory credentials.
I hope people will listen to the interview or download it; encouraging readers to do so was one purpose of the post. They can judge for themselves. To my ear, on two careful listenings, there was a clear tone of alarmed hand-wringing about a technological process that has got out of control. It strikes me as a subtle variant of the “Internet pedophiles will ensnare your kids” stories so favored by newspapers.
The ever tactful Nora Young also responded:
I think new technologies of communication do change the way we think, remember, and relate to one another. I suppose I’m a McLuhanite in that sense. I would say the same about the move from oral to written communication, for instance, so I don’t think it’s really uncharacteristic for Spark, or indeed, part of a moral panic. More than that, though, what I love about Spark is that it’s an opportunity to air provocative ideas about technology, and hopefully inspire debate and dialogue, of which your post is an excellent example.
Contrarian weather forecast
Let the blogosphere note that on Friday morning, contrarian bet a friend that Hurricane Bill would not rank among the 10 highest wind speeds recorded in Nova Scotia in 2009. As of this morning, the bet is looking pretty safe.
Environment Canada and the CBC need to realize that the shrill, cover-your-ass forecasts they adopted in the wake Hurricane Juan are just as dangerous as under-predicting. EC and CBC cry wolf so often, and so predictably, citizens simply tune them out.
This is a topic contrarian will return to. Reader comments welcome.
Local lapses in CBC Radio’s iPhone app explained
This month, Apple approved a free CBC Radio app that offers yet another reason to own an iPhone. It will prove a boon to radio listeners not tied to their radios all day.
The CBC Radio app will give iPhone or iPod users live audio streams from of Radio 1, 2, and 3 (the corp’s net-based, indy-oriented network). It will let users listen in any time zone, so when Atlantic Canadians miss a national program, they have four chances to catch up.
Want to listen to a local show in real time? Pick it off the station menu (below left), our use the “find-your-location” feature.
It also offers archived episodes of many CBC Radio shows. Miss an episode of Spark (currently contrarian’s favorite CBC program)? It’s there on your phone, on demand, whenever you want it.
You can do most of these things on the CBC website, too, but the iPhone app interface is so much cleaner and easier to navigate than the website, many listeners will reach for the phone.
As initially released, the program has a few startling lapses. There are no Maritime locations listed on the Radio One station menu, and the find-your-location function directs Nova Scotiams to Ottawa or Goose Bay, of all places.
It turns out that CBC is in the process of converting all its streaming audio feeds from Windows Media to MP3 format. (That’s a good thing; the CBC’s streaming audio files have tended to be balky.)
Jonathan Carrigan, the CBC’s Product Development Manager for Digital Programming & Business Development, says the missing stations will be added as soon as their streams are converted to MP3. This will require one ore more upgrades to the app, and these will be coming “very soon,” he says. Once the audio stream conversions are complete, Carrigan promises more upgrades, and more features.
Bloggers put media’s copycon coverage to shame
Why is Canada’s news media doing such a shoddy job covering the copyright consultations now taking place in select cities across part of Canada?
At the heart of the consultations on planned changes Canada’s copyright law lies a fundamental question: Should the law protect authors of creative work, or corporate intermediaries who traditionally profited from the massive effort formerly required to reproduce and distribute them?
Thanks to digital technology, the cost of copying and distributing works is rapidly approaching zero. Naturally, those who once profited from copying and distributing creative works are frantically trying to stem the flow of creative works, advocating ever-lengthening copyright protection, and mandatory enforcement of consumer-hostile technologies that prevent all copying, legal or otherwise. In many cases, they have co-opted creator organizations to their cause.
Not surprisingly, news organizations tend to view this question through the lens of corporate intermediaries. With exceptions, they frame the debate in terms University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy De Beer describes as, “the caricature of toiling creators vs. freeloading pirates.”
