Canada has rejected attempts by AgustaWestland and by a consortium led by Airbus to prevent the government from buying billions of dollars worth of aircraft from Boeing.
More later as I'm driving while posting this from my bberry.
The gov't press release on this came out on a Friday at 7:45 pm Ottawa time …
OK, Ok, that headline slightly distorts things but, on the eve of a major international AIDS conference to be held in Toronto, Canada’s New Government — as they call themselves everywhere but on this press release — announce that the government committed $150,000 to a Canadian Labour Congress initiative to help fight AIDS in the workplace. You’ll recall that earlier this week, we learned that Bill Gates will be donating $500–million (U.S.) over five years to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
The office of Jean Pierre Blackburn, Canada’s Labour Minister, issued this release Friday afternoon at 5:30 pm. (Check the time stamp on the release here and here). As a reasonably diligent reporter, I had some questions about this release but you won’t be surprised to learn that when I called both the telephone numbers at the bottom of the press release at 5:40 pm, there was no answer, it being late on a Friday afternoon in midsummer.
“Canada’s New Government” is already coming under fire for the failure of the Prime Minister to attend the conference opening this weekend in Toronto. More than 26,000 scientists and researchers and activists from around the world will be there but not Stephen Harper. Instead, he’ll be winning votes in Iqualuit and Alert.
I’m co-hosting CTV’s Question Period on Sunday and I can tell you that the Harper government’s support for this conference and for the fight against AIDS will be something we’ll be talking about.
More late-in-the-afternoon-on-a-Friday press releases from “Canada’s New Government”, as they like to call themselves. This time, the Treasury Board is announcing that it’s moving ahead, as promised, with new rules about the way advertising and market research contracts are awarded.
From the press release:
As part of its Action Plan commitments, the Government is amending the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada to:
- provide written public opinion research reports and to make them available to the public through the Library of Parliament and Library and Archives Canada within six months of the completion of fieldwork;
- add a statement emphasizing that the bidding process for contracting of public opinion research and advertising activities must be open, fair and transparent; and
- include a new definition of advertising to distinguish it from non-paid messages such as public service announcements and from collateral services such as public relations and events management
Harper made a big point of promising written reports on the campaign trail at an event in Quebec City in which he posed with $132,000 of cold hard cash to make the point that taxpayers had paid that amount of money under the previous Liberal government and yet received only verbal reports from the contractors.
One of the big stories over the last year or so for the Ottawa media has been moving the headquarters of the RCMP.
At first, the Harper government agreed to pay $600–million over 25 years to rent andd then buy for $1 a suite of buildings that once housed a technology company in Ottawa. But then word got out that the lobbyist acting for the developer was a well-connected Conservative.
So, in an attempt to avoid the appearance that it was handing out a mega-buck contract without due process, Public Works made one last call for offers. But in the end, Public Works still came back to the building at 3000 Merivale Road that once housed the Ottawa workforce of technology high-flier JDS Uniphase Corp.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who is the cabinet minister responsible for the Mounties, just issued this release which seals the deal.
Here’s how The Ottawa Citizen described the property:
JDS Uniphase built the 900,000-square-foot complex for about $200 million and at the height of the technology boom, it housed most of the company's 11,000 employees. JDS sold the campus to Minto for about $28 million and it has been standing virtually empty since the purchase last summer.
… for the RCMP, which is squeezed for space, the former technology hub seems like a perfect fit. With several thousand employees in buildings scattered across Ottawa, including its headquarters at 1200 Vanier Parkway, the police force was looking for ways to consolidate operations at one site.
The RCMP considered several options, including renovating and upgrading the Nicholson Building on Vanier Parkway, constructing a new building at its headquarters and adding space to other RCMP locations.
But the force settled on the JDS complex which, featuring eight buildings connected by an atrium, a 300-seat auditorium, gym, laboratories and wiring to accommodate computer systems, has the space, technology and security to meet its needs
Witold Rybczynski reviews three books about the transportation of cargo, including two that focus on the container ship and has this statistical nugget: When the first container ship went into use in the mid-1950s, it cost $5.83 per ton to load loose cargo on a medium-sized ship. It was done “breakbulk”, which meant each of what could tens of thousands of individual items to be carried in the ship’s hold had to be stowed by hand. Once ships were loaded with standardized containers full of cargo, the cost of loading the same ship dropped to 15.8 cents.
“This has benefited coastal regions and penalized people living inland,” writes Rybczynski. “For example, shipping a container overland from Durban, South Africa, to Masera, Lesotho — a distance of 215 miles, costs three times as much as shipping it be sea to Durban from Baltimore. It is likely that without container shipping, the economic upsurge of China would not have occurred as quickly as it did.”
The Government of Canada wants to buy some new aircraft for its military and is using a novel procurement process to do so. It wants, for instance, to buy strategic airlift — planes that can carry four or five tanks, for example, halfway around the world. The military looked at the current models on the market and concluded that only one plane was capable of meeting its strategic airlift requirements, C-17 Globemaster, manufactured by Boeing Co. of Seattle, Wash.
So the government issued a unique procurement document. It said it intended to buy the Globemaster but, if there were any manufacturers out there that could meet the military’s operational requirement, they were free to challenge the government’s assumption. Well, one has.
Similarly, Canada was ready to go to Boeing for new medium– to heavy-lift helicopters that it wants to buy and pick up a few CH-47 Chinooks. But another manufacturer has stepped in and told the government it wants that business.
The press release announcing this was issued at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend — the sort of timing that raises eyebrows among us cynical, suspicious journalists. After all, they had a five-star press conference in Trenton with three cabinet ministers and the chief of defence staff to announce the decision to buy this stuff. Why try to squeak an important update out late in the day before a long weekend? Who are the other companies that have stepped forward to compete against Boeing?
I’d ask the government myself but, as its 10 pm EDT as I sit here at Pearson waiting for my plane to take me home to Ottawa, the odds are I’m not going to have much like finding anyone around to answer this. Oh well, I drew the lucky straw at the office and get to work all weekend. Maybe someone at DND or Public Works has some answers.
As Wikimaniacs gather at, well, Wikimania, an annual conference held this year in Cambridge, Mass., The Globe and Mail publishes a nice profile of Ottawa native Simon Pulsifer, whom the Globe crowns “King of Wikipedia.” Three cheers for Simon!
Prolific Canadian is king of Wikipedia
With more than 80,000 articles under his belt, Ottawa man is the on-line resource's busiest contributor
ALEXANDRA SHIMOSimon Pulsifer has never really blended in with the crowd. In kindergarten, he began building elaborate, fantastical buildings out of Lego, already bored by the construction plans on the back of the box.
In Grade 8, he, attired as Stalin, and other friends re-enacted the Yalta conference on the balcony of a friend's house. In university, he became the Trivial Pursuit champion at his college, and even won when the whole residence took him on.
Today Mr. Pulsifer, 24, is known internationally as the world's most prolific author on the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, with 78,000 entries edited and 2,000 to 3,000 new articles to his name. He can't remember the exact number.
“I'm always doing something for Wikipedia, even when I'm not writing entries,” he said from his home in Ottawa. “I'm always planning and thinking about how I can make the site better.”
One of the basic must-have tools for any reporter is a machine you can use to record interviews and press conferences. I’ve been using a digital voice recorder from Sony for the last several years but it recently disappeared so I went on the hunt for a new one.
My ideal product would let me record in .wav or .mp3 format; time-stamp recordings in time-of-day format rather than run-time format; let me transcribe from my recording from within a word processing program like Microsoft Word; and have some sort of automatic voice-to-text capability. Oh — and it’s got to be cheap.
Let’s take a look at that wish list.
As for the voice-to-text, the dream system would let me download my recording to my PC, hit play, and some software would generate a perfect transcript of what was said. The New York Times most excellent columnist David Pogue got my hopes up recently that such a product — Dragon’s Naturally Speaking — might exist. Here’s what he said in a recent review:
“I can remember, in the early days, having to read 45 minutes' worth of [material] for the software's benefit. But each successive version of NaturallySpeaking has required less training time; in Version 8, five minutes was all it took.
And now they've topped that: NatSpeak 9 requires no training at all.”
but then, deeper in the review, Pogue goes on to say:
“NatSpeak is also available in a range of versions for the American market, including medical and legal incarnations. Mere mortals will probably want to consider either the Standard version ($100) or the Preferred version ($200), each of which comes with a headset. Both offer the same accuracy.
The Preferred edition, however, offers several shiny bells and whistles. One of them is transcription from a digital pocket voice recorder. This approach doesn't provide the same accuracy as a headset, and it requires what today is considered an excruciating amount of training reading: at least 15 minutes. But it does free you from dictating at the computer. “
Pogue doesn't say anything about transcribing several voices from a recording but I would assume, if the software needs 15 minutes to recognize your voice on a recording, it would be pretty tough to recognize other voices on a recording.
As for the timecode format, I’m still looking. When I go to a press conference, I want to hook up my digital voice-recorder to a mixing console or place it near a speaker. I want to turn it on and have it start recording using time-of-day code. That way, I can just look at my watch when I hear something interesting at 5:45 pm during a press conference, I can scribble
@17:45:44 – Harper – wants Red Deer to get an NHL franchise
As it is now, most cheap recorders only offer “runtime” timecode which means if Harper says something interesting 10 minutes into a press conference, I would have to move to “0:10:44” on the file when I review it. Recording time-of-day timecode is so much easier when you’re running around Parliament Hill making several recordings during the day.
I have not yet found one that offers a time-of-day timecode.
So, in the end, I picked up a cheap — under $100 – unit made by Olympus. It does the basics. You can quickly and
easily move files — the default recording format is .wav – to the PC and it has a function that lets you store files on your recorder in “Date” folders. I find that handy for archiving and finding recordings.
You can also set it to start recording at a particular time of day. It does have some indexing features.
After years of computing mostly on a Mac at work, I'm now computing on Windows XP Pro. The software that comes with the Olympus is pretty bare bones and is for Windows only.
After I bought it, though, I found a great little Windows freeware utility that lets you play just about any audio file from within
Microsoft Word or other word processor. It's called Express Scribe and it's great for transcribing because I can use hot keys from within Word to start, stop, pause, slow down, speed up or rewind the recording from within Word.
Love to read your thoughts in the comments section here …
The Conservative Party of Canada is handily beating its political rivals when it comes to fundraising, according to the latest data released by Elections Canada.
Conservatives raised just over $4–million in the second quarter of the year, nearly double the amount of money raised by the Liberals, NDP, Green Party and Bloc Quebecois combined during the same period.
Fervour among Conservatives supporters seems to have hardly abated with their electoral victory on January 23. For the months of April, May and June, 37,871 contributors gave the Conservative party a total of $4,018,952. The Liberals managed to raise just $1.19–million from 8,041 donors. The NDP collected $734,642 from 11,379.
The Green Party, which has no seats in the House of Commons, easily outpaced the Bloc Quebecois, which has 51 MPs, when it comes to fundraising. The Greens raised $193,808 from 4,429 contributors compared to the BQ which netted just $27,556 from 229 contributors.
I’ve got more about this, with comments from Conservative and Liberal officials, back at CTV.ca.
Statistics Canada reports today on a survey of “heavy Internet users”, those that spend more than an hour a day online. That would be me and I’m betting that would be you. The survey says our online time comes at the expense of time with our spouses and friends and we’re more likely to stay indoors and avoid going out.
“They also devoted significantly less time than non-users to paid work and chores around the home, as well as less time sleeping, relaxing, resting or thinking,” said StatsCan. Less time thinking? How do you survey people on the amount of time they think?
Statscan continues: “What is striking is the amount of time they spent alone. Moderate Internet users (those using the Internet for five minutes to one hour during the diary day) spent about 26 more minutes by themselves than non-users during the diary day. But heavy Internet users were alone nearly two hours (119 minutes) longer than non-users, even when comparing people from similar-sized households.”