David Akin’s On The Hill

When I have to answer that question, I turn to the experts, like the trained
economists who work for some of Canada's biggest banks. Now we know that the
U.S. Federal Reserve raised the benchmark interest today by one quarter of
one percentage point. But is this it? Are interest rates going higher?
Well, it depends on who you ask. Here are the subject lines of two e-mails
that landed in my inbox right after another within minutes of the Fed's
announcement:

• Scotia Capital Research: Fed moves towards a
  pause

• [BMO Nesbitt Burns] The Bottom Line: Fed Raises Rates and Signals More
  to Come
  

The two economists in this case are Ladak Zubair at Scotia Capital and Sherry Cooper at Nesbitt Burns.
Now economists are paid a great deal of money to read between the lines of
central bank press releases. When central banks raise or lower interest
rates, they do so only in the form of a carefully worded press release.
There is no press conference. No chance to ask questions or clarify a point
or two. As a result, economists have to try and guess what kind of thinking
went into the press releases.
So here's Ladak Zubair at Scotia Capital:

… the Fed's statement opened the door to a near-term “pause” a
little wider, but for now the bias to raise rates at the next Fed meeting
remains in place. . . . All in, the statement was moderately more dovish
that the last Fed pronouncement, and should see yields move
appropriately.

Here's Cooper's take on the thinking behind the announcement:

… the Fed asserted that “even after this action, monetary
policy remains accommodative” and that “output growth appears to have
regained some traction and labor market conditions have improved modestly”.
They realize that inflation and inflation expectations have eased in recent
months, but they are likely to continue raising rates regardless. The days
of deflation fear are over . . . Even for those of you who are more
pessimistic about the growth outlook, the Fed needs to raise rates now, so
they could, if necessary, lower them later. I don't believe it will be
necessary. My view is the economy will grow at a 3.5+% pace next year. The
Fed will aim for 3%-to-4% fed funds.”

CBS and Dan Rather apologized today for broadcasting information about George W. Bush's record while in the national guard when, as it turns out, they could not verify the authenticity of that information. CBS purported to have documented evidence that Bush ignored some orders and shirked some duties. Turns out the documented evidence was forged and CBS — and Rather, in particular — were forced to acknowledge that fact.
This whole issue may, in the end, have something to do with who gets to be the next U.S. president. But many also believe it has something to do with this new thing called Participatory Journalism, a kind of journalism in which bloggers are leading the way.
Bloggers are taking credit for doing what CBS ought to have done, namely, examining the documents carefully to see if, in fact, the could be real. One of the telltale signs that the documents were forged, for example, were some of the fonts on the documents in question. Some font nut on the Web saw them and knew that the fonts on the document had not yet been invented when the document was allegedly created. Within minutes, this information ended up on a blog and everyone started asking more detailed questions about the memos. After that the whole house of cards came down.
But before some hail this as a watershed moment in so-called “bottom-up” journalism, read some wise words from some of the blogosphere's wisest and most widely read pundits. Here's Steven Johnson:

Think about the other major stories that broke in the last year or so involving misrepresentations or other abuses of power: the Plame Affair, Abu Ghraib, the whole missing-WMD madness. Did the bloggers contribute anything substantive to the reporting — to the facts, not the opinions — of those stories? No, because the central elements in those stories were not matters of typography; …. Until the blogosphere figures out a way to contribute to those kinds of stories — and not just ones where a knowledge of font trivia makes you a genuine expert — I think we'll still prove to be better at framing the news than making it ourselves.

Scott Rosenberg believes the event may have less to say about the power of the Internet than it has to say about the passing of an era:

What really hurts, for CBS and the rest of the networks' news operations, is that, at this late date in media history, trust is the only advantage the broadcast networks can claim. They no longer deliver the news faster than rivals, they certainly don't deliver it in more depth or from more viewpoints or with more style. Their only remaining edge has been a sort of generic, fossilized authority…..n the end, it feels fitting that “60 Minutes' ” vaunted TV news operation was taken in through its ignorance of the Selectric-to-software history of typography. The typed word — TV's achilles' heel!.

Jesse Walker, writing at Reason Online's site, takes this idea of the end of an era a bit further, and suggests the whole affair demonstrates the beginning of a new era, not one in which traditional Old Media is supplanted by New Media but one in which Old Media is transformed or merges with some elements of this New Media to create a new media ecosystem:

That's what is most fascinating about the elimination of media entry barriers, the rise of distributed journalism, and the new influx of reporting and commentary from outside the professional guild. The new outlets aren't displacing the old ones; they're transforming them. Slowly but noticeably, the old media are becoming faster, more transparent, more interactive—not because they want to be, but because they have to be. Competition is quickening the news cycle whether or not anyone wants to speed it up. Critics are examining how reporters do their jobs whether or not their prying eyes are welcome. And if a network or a newspaper doesn't respond to those criticisms—if it doesn't make itself more interactive—then its credibility takes a blow

Walker goes on to say:

…mainstream reporters … are gradually getting locked into an uneasy partnership with their amateur cousins online. It's not a voluntary relationship, and there are news professionals out there who will deny until their dying breath that it exists. It's more like the partnership between Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. But it's real.

Dave Sifry is trying to put together a timeline of the blogosphere's effect on mainstream media.

Thunder Bay's airport is the third busiest in the province – right after
Toronto and Ottawa. I knew that because I spent two years as a reporter for
the paper there. Met my wife
there, too. That means we're back to Thunder Bay from time to time to visit
family. Nice to know, then, that the Thunder Bay International Airport
just signed a deal to have a Wi-Fi network installed that travellers can
access from inside the main passenger terminal.
The company installing the network is Opti-Fi
Networks LLC of Annapolis, Md. Opti-Fi says this is fourth Canadian
airport they're about to wire up (albeit with slightly slower 802.11b)
The company says fees for the service are expected to be $2.95 for 15
minutes ($.25/min each additional), $3.95 per hour, or $9.95 per day.

Andrew at This Magazine's blog has a link that you will find addictive: A world geography quiz:

Think you know your countries? Take this quiz. I scored a pathetic 40%, though I think I deserve half marks for getting Haiti/Dominican Republic backward…. [BLOG.THISMAGAZINE.CA]

I scored only slightly better than Andrew the first time I took it, getting 50 per cent. I mistook Sudan for Nigeria and (gulp) Jamaica for San Marino among other dopey mistakes. Knew where Spain was, though!
The quiz lets you represent your country. Canadians taking the quiz were scoring exactly what I was. Apparently New Zealanders are doing the best with a score of about 60 per cent.

Thousands of
Guyanese were without Internet access last week after a submarine broke
a cable in French Guiana. The country's telecommunications provider has
blocked ISPs from establishing satellite links, claiming a monopoly on voice
and data services. [Clipped from BNA's Internet Law News]

A new book looks at recent developments in Canadian public policy when it comes to information and communications technologies. Here's a promotional blurb being circulated by one of the book's editors:

Seeking Convergence in Policy and Practice: Communications in the Public Interest, Volume 2
Edited by Marita Moll and Leslie Regan Shade. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2004.
It's a post 9-11 communications world. E-mail is polluted with obnoxious spam and data-eating viruses. Governments are nervously trying to bring order to the chaos through regulation — the very instrument that was labelled during the '90's as offensive to progress. The “information wants to be free” rally cry of early Internet libertarians has been replaced by the “information needs to be monitored” cry of the new surveillance society.
In this new collection, noted Canadian academics and activists explore critical communications issues, from meaningful citizen engagement in public policy debate to privacy protection in the emerging health infostructure.
Order form, Table of Contents, Preface, and Introduction

Here's a good idea:

“….Students Promoting Awareness of Research Knowledge program(SPARK), a writing workshop for students to teach them the skills for communicating scientific research through the media to an intelligent readership.
[It is run by Linda] Cooper [who] believes it's crucial for writers and academics to be able to convey complex ideas to the general public: “Not to oversimplify what people do, but to keep the [research's] meaning intact, to make it as accessible as possible,” she says.
This year, SPARK is expanding to WARM-SPARK (Writing About Research at McGill) to include social sciences and the humanities. …. Under Cooper's enthusiastic guidance, students choose researchers to interview and write about. The stories are then pitched to different media, from McGill's Reporter to the Globe and Mail. The group meets once a week to go over each other's writing and discusses the tangled aspects of scholarly work at McGill. Not only do the students explore different disciplines through the researchers they talk to, they are also exposed to the varied backgrounds of the group members . ..”

RHex is a robot built at the University of Michigan based on discoveries by UC Berkeley's Robert Full about how cockroaches run. RHex is the center of a new, multidisciplinary effort to understand how we walk without falling over. (Photo: Daniel Koditschek, University of Michigan)

About $5-million U.S. — but it could be more if scientists at UC Berkeley and elsewhere in the U.S. are unable to come up with the answer over the term of the $5-million grant they just received from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Seriously, though: If they find an answer to that question, scientists believe they will have figured out humans manage to get around without falling down. And if they figure that out, well, presumably it would be nothing at all to figure out how to make a humanoid robot walk around.
“The hallmark of life is movement,” said Robert Full, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and leader of the team that received the grant. “Yet, no single systems-level model, reaching from neurons to muscles to the skeleton to the whole body, can explain the control that makes movement possible. You have so many nerves and so many muscles, how in the world do you actually move forward?”
The robot pictured here, incidentally, looks an awful lot like ones developed at McGill University in Montreal at that school's Centre for Intelligent Machines. There's a good reason for that since the 'RHex” brand of robots is being developed by researchers at McGill, Berkeley and the University of Michigan.
McGill has a RHex that can walk on its hind legs. Another one (pictured left at the bottom) can swim. It's also a tenacious little bugger that can even right itself after falling over a cliff. (There are many videos of the robots at McGill archived at the lab's Web site and many are sure to make you laugh. RHex on his hind legs is no exception. And you can just hear the scientists start laughing at the end of the RHex on the Cliff video. And please check out Bounder. But after you're done chuckling, think of the engineering wizardry required to get these gadgets to do what they do! Amazing.)

Bloggers Find Clicks Don't Mean Cash
Bloggers at this summer's political conventions brought heightened visibility to blogging, but the money, for most bloggers, is still missing … [Read the rest of this story]

For this blog, I signed up last March with Google's AdSense campaign (). You give up a part of your blog (or Web site, for that matter) to Google and Google will constantly crawl your site and, based on the content there, serve up some ads that Google's ad bots believe would be interesting to your blog's readers. You — the blog publisher, that is — get paid a few pennies for every one of your readers that click through to an advertiser.
Now, I'm not getting a whole lot of traffic but I figured my traffic was still decent enough that this program might make some sense.
It hasn't.
Since I signed up in March, I've racked up all of $25 from Google. Mind you, that's twenty-five dollars American which I figure has got to be worth at least one Canadian two-four.
And last week, I took the back the space I was giving to Google. I'm now ad-free.