David Akin’s On The Hill

The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, holding its annual convention this week in Quebec City, released a poll this afternoon guaging attitudes Canadians have about media. Of some note: Many Canadians would support their tax dollars going to support Canadian broadcasting and many erroneously believe that newspapers received financial support from federal government grants.
A press release with all the survey details is here but here's some interesting excerpts:

• Not surprisingly, Canadians expect news from Canadian local daily newspapers and national
  newspapers specifically. However, Canadian newspapers do more than keep Canadians informed. Under the layer of articles, pictures and commentaries lay important societal benefits. A strong majority of Canadians feel that their newspapers play an important role in terms of keeping their government accountable, promoting a sense of community, of national pride and of unity, and promoting Canadian athletes and history.

• Despite this increase in use of Canadian media, Canadians agree that the Canadian media is faced with a number of significant challenges. Not only do they agree that the volume of foreign media is threatening to overwhelm Canadian voices in Canadian media but they also feel that the reliance on such foreign media is likely to increase due to declines in funding for Canadian content.
• Canadian content is so important to Canadians that 7 in 10 would accept that a greater proportion of tax dollars be used to ensure that Canadian content is available to Canadians for many years to come. As for maintaining or improving the quality and accessibility of the programming
  Canadians have come to expect from Canadian radio and television broadcasters, fully 82% of Canadians believe the government should dedicate the same or more funds and resources to broadcasting in Canada.

• Although Canadian local dailies and national dailies do not depend at all on federal funds, it is nonetheless interesting that the Canadian public is not very well informed on this matter. Fully twothirds of Canadians think that daily newspapers some federal funding.
• “Fully two-thirds of Canadians consider at least some newspaper advertising informative while 80% consider the advertising found in newspapers at least somewhat acceptable. ‘Acceptability’ of advertising in newspapers does change noticeably once respondents are informed that newspapers do not depend on government funds to operate.”

Julie Chrysler, the editor of This Magazine, needs arts writers. Here's the message she's circulating:

Calling all arts writers:
Well, maybe not all arts writers. But arts writers who want to write for This Magazine (please don't flame me about our pay rates – trust me, I know all about it).
This Magazine is launching a new section. Starting in Jan 2004, we will be publishing opinionated 1000-1200 word essays examining and critiquing trends and issues in the noble, popular and underground art worlds.
We are on the lookout for writers from across the country with sassy wit and something original to say about arts and culture.
Questions? Ideas? Get in touch with me at editor@thismagazine.ca or our section editor Lisa Whittington-Hill at arts@thismagazine.ca

One of the perks of being a tech reporter is that manufacturers lend you their newest gadgets from time to time. The newest gadget I've got is the 17-inch PowerBook from Apple. You might have seen the ads on TV with MiniMe from the Austin Powers movies and that giant Chinese NBA player on the plane. MiniMe has the 17-inch PowerBook and the the big guy as the 12-inch version. Ha Ha. But I digress. You cannot believe the size of the screen on this machine — and the machine is only one inch thick. My colleague George Emerson reviews this machine in the lastest edition of Report On Business Magazine and, so far, I agree with much of what he says, particularly on the issue of size. “I've always believed big screens fall too far on the side of clunky in the balance between portability and performance. Small screens, those around 11 or 12 inches, are extremely portable, and the best ones have good guts (fast processors and capacious memory),” George wrote. “I was quite prepared to reject the PowerBook 17 out of hand if it didn't fit snugly in my briefcase. When it did, I began to reconsider my aversion to big-screen notebooks…” George ended up liking the machine quite a bit and — while I've had it for all of about three days now — I'm liking it, too.
I had been carrying around an 11-inch iBook — very light, very portable, very mobile. I was worried that the immense footprint and size of the machine I have now would simply be too much, that I would be giving up too much mobility. Well, at just one inch (2.5 cm) thick when closed, so far, the tradeoff of mobility vs size has been just about nil. This is a pretty impressive machine.
I've just installed OS 10.3 (Panther) on it and plan to give it a good workout over the next week in a variety of conditions. Only little beef so far is that this machine comes with the Airport Extreme card as standard equipment. (Airport is the brand name for Apple's WiFi group of networking products.) The iBook I just have up had the first-generation (lower max bandwidth) Airport card on board, too. But the first-generation seemed to work much better with my LinkSys wireless router than what's under the hood of this PowerBoook. Perhaps some more tweaking will help.

The University of California (UCAL) Berkeley has completed its second “How Much Information” study. The researchers conclude that the the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years, reaching five miliion terabytes or five billion gigabytes or five exabytes by the end of 2002, compared to half that in 1999.
I wish I could remember the source — probably Wired or could have been something Kurzweil wrote — of some geek's estimate that if you could digitize all the experiences of an average human being's lifetime, you would end up with 5 terabytes of data.
Nonetheless, a terabyte is still an awfully big chunk of data.

Whether it's a book-length biography or a newspaper profile, writers who do biographical pieces are often faced with a dilemma: Access versus Independence of Thought. As a writer, I want to get as close to my subject as possible, to see him or her in their private moments, in closed door meetings, and get lots of exclusive material. The price for that kind of good stuff, though, is usually Independence of Thought. The subject may grant that access in return for some control over what you write. That can range from veto power over the entire project to being able to modify interview notes. If you want complete independence of thought, you may never be granted a chance to speak to your subject let alone get close to him or her. Well, here's a neat new strategy. For his new biography of Larry Ellison, Matthew Symonds agreed to let Ellison share the page with him. Ellison gave Symonds some terrific access, allowing the writer to accompany Ellison to closed-door meetings, for example, and, in exchange, Ellison was allowed to respond via footnotes in Symond's biography. I like it.

Corporate governance and issues of disclosure and transparency are the hot topics on Wall Street these days.
Now, in the wake of some rule changes by the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, if I interview an analyst by phone that will qualify as a “public appearance”. What are the implications for journalists in Canada? Well, for one thing, I got a note yesterday from the PR woman at Merrill Lynch Canada letting me know that I can no longer phone up some of the economists and analysts I would routinely contact at that banks Toronto or New York office without first going through a PR woman and listening to a standard spiel about disclosure.
And while none of my sources have done this to me yet, there's a chance the analyst could be forced to disclose what s/he said in that interview as soon as it's over, even before I publish the contents of the interview!
Here's a story on this;

Banks Eye Analyst Disclosure: Big Board Expands 'Public Appearance' Guide
The NYSE and the NASD have added print media interviews to existing rules on disclosure of TV appearances by analysts. Banks must maintain records of interviews whether they're published or not.

We reported on this in today's Globe and Mail (Toronto). Sony deletes terrorist attack. From the story: Electronics giant Sony Corp. yesterday bowed to intense pressure from Quebec politicians and decided to delete video-game scenes featuring separatist terrorists engaging in bloody gunfights in a Toronto shopping mall and subway.
Syphon Filter 4: The Omega Strain included terrorists from the fictitious Quebec Liberation Front attacking Toronto with biological weapons, machine guns and grenades. The video-game player is told to “mow down” the terrorists.”
Here's the paragraphs I wrote for that story that didn't make it into the paper or online version. Please note, that the following really should be viewed in context with the story at the link above:

Almost all ex-FLQ members now live away from the spotlight, working in trades such as librarian, university professor or union executive.
The FLQ began in 1963 with a series of bombings against symbols of the Anglophone establishment in Quebec — army depots, factories, mailboxes — and culminated in the October, 1970, kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and the murder of provincial labour minister Pierre Laporte.
The real FLQ of the 1960s and 1970s never attacked any targets in Toronto or outside of Quebec.
Reached by telephone afetr Sony made its decision to change the contents of his game, Mr. Garvin seemed to be in ill humour and quickly hung up the phone.
Mr. Garvin heads up one of Sony’s in-house software studios in Bend, a medium-sized city of about 60,000 people in the central part of that state.
As with previous Syphon Filter games, the player works through various levels or missions.
The meta-mission for the series to stop a global terrorist consortium from unleashing the fictional Syphon Filter virus, a biological weapon that could kill millions.
Syphon Filter 4 started in a Toronto shopping mall. The player comes across dozens of dead people, victims of the Syphon Filter virus. The player must then avoid some gun-toting scientists while trying to perform an autopsy on one of the bodies. Subsequent missions put the player in Toronto’s subway system where the player must jump up on the roof of a moving subway and defuse a bomb while fighting bad guys.
The central character is named Gabe Logan, who works for a group known only as The Agency. The Agency’s mission is to rid the world of the Syphon Filter virus.
Logan’s goal and, by extension, the goal of the game’s players, is to destroy the terrorist organizations who are planning to use the virus, and prevent an attack on Moscow by Chechen rebels.

One of my favourite journals, The New York Review of Books celebrates its 40th anniversary with the current issue. Congratulations!

A story moved on the Reuters wire last week describing how some new services are about to debut in Finland that will let parents keep track of their kids using a GPS-enabled cell phone. My producers thought it was a neat idea and wondered if anything like that was going to happen in Canada. I said I'd look into it. Then, this week in Toronto, <a href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20031021/missing_girl031020/?s_name=a 9-year-old girl was abducted from her home, apparently while sleeping. The idea of some technology gadget that would lead parents and law enforcement types right to the missing child became especially appealing. It quickly made it to the top of my to-do list.
So I asked around about a technology, be it cellphones or anything else, to keep track of kids using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology.
The short answer is: There is no, nor is there likely to be, a GPS-enabled solution that could keep track of our kids. If you think, otherwise, of course, let me know.
Some stuff I learned tracking down this non-story:

• No service provider in Canada has a service like the ones to debut in Finland although “Telus last week announced the first GPS-enabled cell phone handsets in Canada. )
• A company in the U.S. called Wherify offers a 'Child Locator' service using GPS systems and digital PCS phones. The service is available only in the U.S.
• In all cases, be it Finland, Telus, or Wherify, a consumer GPS deviced can be easily defeated by someone who wants to remain hidden. That is most easily done by simply moving indoors. Consumer GPS systems do not work unless there is a line-of-sight connection to a satellite. Providers are working to get around this limitation mostly by using digital PCS phone transmitters to act as locators. Even still, digital PCS coverage is spotty in many areas and can also be defeated in, say, a parking garage or a subway. And, of course, relying on a cell phone network to transmit data means the cell phone network has to work. And not just any cell phone network but a digital PCS network. Travelling to a remote area or an area where the only cellphone coverage is old-fashioned analog cellular will defeat the GPS system. In all cases, the devices will be defeated as soon as the battery wears out. We're all familiar with how long batteries last in cellphones. They are most quickly drained by making calls. Using them for GPS would drain them even faster. The makers of the Wherify device (it's a thick wrist-watch device that gets locked to a kids' wrist) lasts for about 60 hours before it needs recharging.