Feenberg was then a philosophy professor at San Diego State University but I'm pleased to see that he's been lured up to the Great White North and holds a Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.... However, all agreed that technology was an autonomous force separate from society, a kind of second nature impinging on social life from the alien realm of reason in which science too find its source.... Insofar as we continue to see the technical and the social as separate domains, important aspects of these dimensions of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society...   more »

Unable to afford to produce a music video to promote themselves, UK band Get Out Clause came up with an ingenious plan. They set up and performed their music in front of 80 of the 1,300 closed-circuit television cameras used by British state security. One of those cameras was even on a bus. Then they used the British equivalent of access to information laws, known as the Data Protection Act, to request all the footage the state "collected" of them. They pumped the video into some cheap off-the-shelf digital video editing software (iMovie on the Mac, for example) and - presto! - Get Out Clause has their first video.
Tune isn't' bad either. Here you go:

This project brings together a distinguished collection of Internet observers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, activists, technologists and still other experts, to write short essays, to foster an on-going public dialogue, and to create a durable record of how the rules of cyberspace are being formed, potentially impacting their future incarnation.... But it will not seem like governance until someone nests boxes in an “inappropriate” way, and someone else draws a box around them all and says, “Dude, stop inserting your spammy boxes in the middle of our conversation.”   more »

Joseph Stalin, despite being one of the most vicious tyrants of the 20th century (and an ethnic Georgian), makes it on to the initial long list of 500 names, and is expected to garner a fair few votes.... But while the German broadcaster ZDF has said that Adolf Hitler and all other Nazi leaders will be barred from running in the "Our Best" series due to start soon, the Russian version includes Stalin and several other Bolsheviks involved in the Great Terror in its long list .

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But really, do they need to lord it over their opponents while announcing what should be a wholly non-partisan initiative - sending aid to Burma?
Read the press release put out by the Canadian International Development Agency (Bev Oda, prop.) this afternoon. Can you sense the ALL-CAPS "told-you-so" attitude when CIDA points out that this aid is travelling to Burma via ONE of our FOUR C-17s?

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... That prompts Kevin Bausch, the director of the Liberal Research Bureau, to heckle Flaherty from the sidelines. At these committee meetings (this one was in West Block 269), staffers for the Opposition sit on chairs lined up one side of the room and the Conservative staffers sit on the other side. Bausch had chimed in a few times during this rather raucous meeting and was doing it again while Flaherty was giving McCallum the gears. This apparently infuriated the young and impetuous Rossano Bernardi, the recently installed director of Parliamentary Affairs for Flaherty . . .   more »

Proposed changes to Canada's employment insurance system could leave it short billions of dollars if the economy takes a turn for the worse, a deficit that workers and employers would have to make up for with sharply increased premiums, says a former chief actuary for the fund. Michel Bedard, who was chief actuary for the federal employment insurance fund through much of the 1990s, says new rules proposed by the Conservative government ostensibly designed to eliminate the accumulation of billions of dollars of surpluses could, in fact, leave the EI fund billions short...   more »

It's a bit chilly and windy on Parliament Hill this lunch hour but that seems not have chilled the enthusiasm of a few thousand who who have gathered on the Centre Block's front lawn to demonstrate against Canadian abortion laws.
This is an annual event here on the Hill held ...   more »