David Akin’s On The Hill

Frederiction, New Brunswick is a charming city in a charming province and is even more so now for the foresight of its municipal council and leaders. Late last week, Frederiction announced it was, so far as anyone knows, the first municipality in Canada to light up a Wi-Fi network. The Fred e-Zone will be available in many of the city's public areas, the city said. “Like streetlights and sidewalks, this intellectual infrastructure is becoming the new municipal infrastructure of the 21st century for smart communities,” the city said in a press release announcing the deal.
New Brunswick is actually a hotbed of techno-activity. A few years ago I got to visit some test facilities run by the provincial phone company Aliant in Saint John. This Living Lab, as they called it, was a place for vendors like Cisco and Nortel to deploy and test new types of equipment and services. Over in New Brunswick's third city, Moncton, Aliant was trying out a fabulous DSL product called Vibe, which put 30 megabits of bandwidth to its customers for the price of most 1 megabit services in other parts of Canada. Considering it takes about 6 megabits of bandwidth to deliver a television signal to a home, the Vibe service offered all sorts of possibilities for Aliant. But then Aliant became absorbed by one of its minority shareholders, the same company the owns my employers, CTV and The Globe and Mail, and the Vibe service was killed. A shame really. Still, DSL services in Atlantic Canada are among the best in the country. And now, of course, there's Wi-Fi all over Frederiction.

Toronto police arrested a man this week and laid what is believed to be the first-ever charge of “Theft of Telecommunications”. The case involves accusations of child porn and Wi-Fi. We led our national newscast with this item on Friday night and yet, so far as I can tell, no other major media outlet picked this up and it received only cursory treatment in The Toronto Star and from The Canadian Press.
You can view my report on CTV News from a link here.
This charge is a bit murky from a legal standpoint. The police cannot say who the victim of the theft was. At the press conference announcing the charge, they could not say if the telecommunications services that were stolen were owned by a residence or a business. (The man was driving in a residential area, however, so it seems to a decent assumption that it was a home.)
It raises some questions for Wi-Fi users in Canada: If you find an open Wi-Fi network and jack in, can you be charged with theft?

I've been telling PR types and others for more than two years where they can find me on various instant messaging networks and I'm surprised that the response has been so underwhelming. I almost never hear from someone via IM who's trying to reach me in a professional capacity, i.e. to wonder if want a press release, a phone call, or some information about their company. And yet, many PR types think nothing of interrupting me with a phone call. I would much rather deal with an IM message than a phone call, if for no other reason than I can archive my IM conversations and they can be searched easily later.
For the PR folks, I would think IM would be particularly helpful because I try to let people know, via my status message if I'm online, on the phone, or whatever.
My IM nicks (and all my other contact info, for that matter) is always correct at davidakin.com . I prefer Yahoo's IM service. My nick there is davidakin2372 but a lot of folks are on MSN Messenger and there, you'll find me by typing in dakin@ctv.ca. Just a few minutes ago, I finally took out .mac account and am running iChatAV on my Macs (no camera just yet is hooked up). On iChat, I'm to be found at jdavidakin .

Tara Calishain points out that the Government of Canada is doing RSS feeds. Right on!

Canadian Government Now Offering RSS Feeds
You GO, Canada. The government of Canada is now offering RSS
feeds. (Apparently they've been offering them for a while,
but a reader just clued me in.)
The feeds are available at http://tinyurl.com/vrh7 . All the feeds I saw
were news feeds. They include national news, news by region, and news
by audience (including Aboriginal peoples, non-Canadians, women, and
children.) There's also a little bit of background on RSS and a couple
of links to RSS tools.

The list is here and I must say, nine were new to me. Some are way cool.

Found this at a blog maintained by an exec producer at NECN
THE LAW OF BREAKING NEWS
Breaking news” is usually neither.
COROLLARY TO THE LAW OF BREAKING NEWS
Breaking news will exceed your “breaking news” line item in the budget.
RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW OF BREAKING NEWS, with respect to MURPHY
When there actually is breaking news, it will happen when you are on skeleton staff.
THE LAW OF NEWS CONSPIRACIES
Those who believe there is a “giant media conspiracy” have never seen three producers try to agree what to get on a pizza.
COROLLARY TO THE LAW OF NEWS CONSPIRACIES
The media are not right-wing, left-wing, pro-choice, pro-abortion, pro-gun, anti-war or any other such nonsense. We are pro-leaving-work-on-time and very pro-heading-to-the-bar.
THE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS PARADOX
Those who can't write are assigned to write the most.
PARKINSON'S LAW, RESTATED FOR NEWS
Your breaking news coverage will always exceed the “breaking news” line item in the budget.
FIRST AND SECOND LAW OF PRODUCING. AND THIRD LAW.
Nobody will ever be satisfied with your show. Including you.
LAW OF REPORTING
Producers will always give you 15 seconds less than you need to tell the story.
RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW OF REPORTING
Reporters will always take 15 seconds more than they need.
THE ENG LAW OF CONSERVATION OF ENERGY
You can have a sat shot, a microwave, a fiber feed and a newsroom live: you just can't have all of them right now.
THE THREEFOLD LAW OF NEWS EXPERIENCE
You will never get done paying your dues. You will always think your managers are nuts. You will never work in a market you can afford to live in.
NEWS WEBSITE CHAOS THEORY
Every department in your station will want more space on the front page.
THE “VIEWERS ARE OUR CONSULTANTS” POSTULATE
You can't affect change at your station. But if you send an anonymous email to the station suggesting the same change, it will occur.
PRODUCER'S PARADOX
No matter how well you time a show, it will always be 25 seconds heavy.
THE SECOND PRODUCER’S PARADOX
Despite that, you will get off on time.
THE ACCU-FORECAST 3001 RESTATEMENT OF PARKINSON'S LAW
A weather report will expand to fit the time allotted.
THE “BALANCED NEWS” PARADOX
Equally distributed quotes from both sides do not a balanced report make.
AVERY'S RULE OF THREE, REDEFINED FOR NEWS
Famous deaths always come in threes.
THE FIRST OBSERVATION OF THE NEWSROOM
Everyone in news is a procrastinator.
NEWS JOBS FIRST IRONY
By the time the job is posted on a station’s website, someone has it.
HEISENBERG'S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE, APPLIED TO NEWS
The time between an employee's hire, and their complaint they are underpaid, is too small to be measured accurately.
THE LAW OF NEWSROOM EQUIPMENT
If it breaks, we own it.
NEWSROOM SICK DAY THEOREM
People will use precisely the number of sick days allotted.

We have lots of anecdotes about the increasing use of surveillance in society post-9/11 and the increasing controversies and public policy fissures that surveillance is causing. Now, a group of researchers led by David Lyon at Queen's University will spend the next four years examining the implications of the increasing flow across international borders of ?personal data?, from telephone numbers and PINs to fingerprints and retinal scans. In Canada, we're deadling with the fact that if we fly on an international flight, some personal information is going to be passed on to U.S. authorites.
?Surveillance is not just something done to people by the government or the police: it?s also determined by how far the ordinary person is prepared to go along with it,? Lyon said in a Queen's University press release announcing the study. (The press release was prompted by the release of a $1.9-million federa research grant for this project.)
?Neither complacency on the one hand, nor paranoia on the other, is a very useful response. We?d like to generate some informed debate that will lead to increased awareness and positive change.?
I spoke briefly with Lyon about this earlier this week. Didn't have enough yet to fight for space in the Globe but it was an interesting conversation nonethless. Hope to put some working notes up here sooner than later.
Interestingly, an hour or two after that discussion, I recevied electronic notice of a conference to be held in April in Surrey, U.K. carrying the title: The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity. Lyon, as it turns out, is to be a keynote speaker at this conference. Here's the conference description:

The rapid adoption and diffusion of mobile devices over the past decade has transformed the way information is generated, organized and communicated about individuals and their lives. The construction of new mobile data profiles and of mobile, informatic selves, hold the potential to transform what is organizationally and interpersonally meant by privacy, individuality, community, risk, trust, and reciprocity in a mobilizing, and globalizing world.
In order to examine these transformations, the RIS:OME project at the University of Surrey is hosting an international, interdisciplinary conference to address emerging social and cultural relations of mobility, privacy, identity, information and communication. This conference will bring together academic, industry and policy researchers and practitioners to critically address how mobile information and communications technologies structure relations of privacy, security, trust, power, identity and difference.

There was a Wi-Fi meetup in Toronto just last night and I had no idea. That does it. I've got make sure I'm reading Joey's blog every 20 minutes. And Rader's, too.
Incidentally — if you're a Canadian Wi-Fi hotspot provider, Wi-Fi telco provider, Wi-Fi enthusiast or just want to know about Wi-Fi, drop me a line. I'm putting some stories together on this thing for the network and I'd like to hear from you.

Noel Malcolm reviews the new book by Terry Eagleton in The Daily Telegraph and hits several nails on the head when it comes to his assessment of sludge of verbiage that passes for academic discourse. (Can't say if he's right or wrong about Eagleton's book, not having read it yet.)

Go to your nearest academic bookshop and look at the section labelled “Cultural Studies” . . . If you open these books and try reading a page or two, you will probably notice one more thing: most of them are unreadable. The reason for this is not that the authors are generally stupid or uneducated – rather the opposite. These are clever people who have spent years mastering bodies of theory and styles of argument, to the point where they can produce new quantities of the same. But the overwhelming impression they give is that they are writing to impress one another, not to enlighten you or me . . . something has gone terribly wrong. Not only have these clever cultural theorists ended up producing stuff which will never emancipate ordinary people, because no ordinary person can read it. They have turned into cultural relativists, and given up on the whole theory of emancipation. They do not believe in a general project of freeing people from the cultural or economic forces that oppress them; they are against general projects or general values tout court.