Please sign this petition

It will take less than a minute to sign this petition to help encourage the provincial and federal leaders to advance the commitments that have already been made for conserving essential forests in northern Canada.

Why doesn't Canada have a National Science Advisor?

The answer is our Prime Minister Stephen Harper eliminated the role in late 2007. A few weeks ago President Obama recruited Harvard professor John Holdren as his primary science advisor and to run the White House Office of Science and Technology. Holdren directly advises Obama; who brings such issues directly to our PM and who does the PM consult when he has a gap in his strategic or tactical understanding of how public policy may be influenced by science and technology ? In theory the Advisor role was to be replaced by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council. In the last 23 months the STIC has published one document on their website and list an underwhelming five press releases. Holden has been on the job for less than a month and he already has the following 2 minute video on the OST site.


Is it possible Mr. Harper feels his knowledge of science and technology requires no assistance? Or perhaps he defers to Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear who recently refused to say he believes in evolution. That is kind of like the Minister of Finance refusing to agree that he believes in capitalism. Goodyear said evolution was a religious issue – even the Vatican agrees that evolution is a scientific fact. AAAS have recently published an interesting interview with Holdren that is worth reading as well.

The Great Disruption ?

In his NY Times column Thomas Friedman, author of the books The World is Flat and Hot Flat and Crowded, recently hypothesized:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
For more from Friendman check out his NY Times columns and videos.

What is this?

Have a look at the attached photo and let me know where you think I am:

A) A bar
B) A hotel lobby
C) The Microsoft VIP Centre
D) A high-end home design centre
E) A high-end movie theatre
F) A high-end airport lounge
G) A wine boutique.

Hint ... I am in the Seattle area, my flight is in about six hours, I am done with work for the day and they serve wine.

Don

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EWB conference

For three days I have attended the annual Engineers Without Borders conference where 600 student and professional chapter members were probing the challenges of effective international development and the continued growth of EWB. Unlike a typical cheerleader conferences, the folks at EWB actively pursue the limits and limitations of their efforts. They promote Fair Trade as a strategic direction by spending Thursday evening on the streets of Toronto talking to thousands of commuters while inviting vocal opponents to speak at the conference. Every breakout session is at least two-thirds participant workshop rather than speaker monologue. Their founders & co-CEOs ask "where are we going" and literally set flame to their published mission statement without an immediate roll out of a replacement solution and encourage a decentralized analysis of future direction.



World leading physicist and Perimeter Institute director Neil Turuk gave the Gala dinner talk about his African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Jim Balsillie opened Friday by suggesting EWB take advantage of his Centre for International Governance Innovation's IGLOO information sharing platform. Roy Steiner, Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation opened Thursday with a 45 minute talk but stayed an extra day to gather data from EWB's oversea volunteers.

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Powerful women

SD = (HC x SP x EE) ** Women
where,
SD = Sustainable Development
HC = Human Condition (basic needs such as shelter, food, clean water, medicine)
SP = Social Position (such as cast or cultural prosecution)
EE = Enabling Environment (everything from climate & weather to agriculture policy, land ownership rights , business start-up complexity , access to investment funds)


This is a very interesting equation presented by Kevin McCort, the CEO at CARE Canada, to help describe the complexity in international development. Note the three factors HC, SP and EE are all interacting functions and the product is then raised to the power of women. A few women will have a small change in development, but a lot will cause an enormous change. And a zero in any factor, no matter how many women are involved will generate no results.

I have heard George Roter, co-founder of Engineers Without Borders comment that if you monitored just one single factor in a society as a proxy for development it would be women's education level. For a society to have more women with more education will require a cascade of things to have occurred which in total will minimize the systemic problems associated with poverty such as access to healthcare, social imbalance, etc - in essence HC, SP & EE.

Tomorrow Today Election Q&A

A group of twelve national conservation and environmental groups submitted six questions to the leaders of all the national parties. The 90-second per question video response from each party is interesting in part due to the absence of any response from the Conservatives.

Election season - where is the science debate?

Looking through the standard national media sites I found only one article about Canadian science and technology policy. The CBC article essentially asks the same thing I am asking - where is the public debate or discussion?

The Liberals are showing steady increases to NSERC; the Green Party would invest in "green" technology and remove funding to the oil industry. But I would like to hear how the Conservatives justify the elimination of the National Science Advisor earlier this year. Who is advising the PM? Maybe Stockwell Day who thinks humans lived with dinosaurs within the last few thousand years? Mr. Harper and other cabinet members seem to follow the George Bush school of anti-science. While 22% of Canadians polled believe "God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years," is it really too much to ask for our elected officials to have a better education?

Our economy isn't going to make it too far into the 21st century unless we have a more science-literate population. And that requires appropriate political understanding and foresight. The natural resource extraction industries which were the foundation of Canada need to be eclipsed by value added industries that will require substantial understanding of science and technology by the workforce and by politicians.

Burano Italy

Near Venice is the famous Murano glass factory. In fact you can buy the glass all over the place around here. But you would be hard pressed to find anything equal to the colourful village of Burano where every little house is painted some wild or vibrant colour. And they have canals too. And a leaning tower.
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Brigade Video DRAFT

Editing video is both fun and time consuming. With about ten hours of video and a few hundred photos to work with I am slowly working towards a 10-15 minute video. I will also assemble a bunch of other clips together to make a DVD to distribute to the crew members and other crews. This is a link to my .mac account which will eventually morph into my mcmurtry.ca site.