I don't know why they're here or where they're coming from, but ever since I posted a picture (right) I took at the 2005 Detroit Auto Show of a Mercedes SmartCar, it has consistently been among the top 20 posts every month around here. And, sure enough, among the 76,000-plus individuals who dropped by this blog at least once last month, the SmartCar was the top pick. Here are the other most popular posts here for last month   more »

You might want to buy two batteries for a grand total of two bucks and even if you had cash to pay for it, Radio Shack's clerks wanted to know your name, postal code, mailing address, home phone - and all sorts of stuff.... In retail speak, they want "a relationship" with you, which means they want to add you to their database of customers, a database which they might cross-reference with a host of other publicly and privately available databases so that they might more efficiently extract money from you or, more likely, limit the choices you might make.... But here's something that ought to worry them: According to a new survey by Canada's Privacy Commissioner, 13 per cent of us -- better than one in 10 -- lie when a store clerk asks us for stuff.

Gene Spafford is no Luddite (though he worries, below, he might sound like one with this rant he mailed in to Dave Farber's list) but he is a smart guy and a digital pioneer who worries about the implications of generations of students hooked up to Bittorrent never having to pay for a textbook: As noted, the whole mechanism of textbooks (and books in general) is changing.... I know all the arguments about the cyber revolution making knowledge quickly available, at how we can avoid cabals and politics by publishing new results quickly, about how scarce funds can be spent on items other than books, and how even 3rd world scholars can have instant access.... Yet, as a scholar and educator, i worry how to ensure that all our students get the best, most correct materials, that our researchers use correct and commonly-available results, and that we document our progress in correct and archival formats for generations to come.

The Greens, in particular, are drawing support from all mainstream parties although the conventional thinking in Ottawa these days is that any Conservatives that were going to defect have already done so and new membership growth is coming at the expense of the uncommitted, former Liberals, former NDPers and former péquistes -- but not necessarily in that order. So, after downloading some of the numbers from Elections Canada Web site (I appreciate that they're trying and all the data is, in fact, there, but, jeepers, it's tough to grab the raw data so you can run your own tables and analysis ....)... Just to highlight those average donations: If the Liberals can, in fact, get it in gear, they should be find fundraising success simply because their donors tend to give more.

Elections Canada announced today that the five registered political parties who met the criteria for public funding laid down by Jean Chrétien are about to get their quarterly cheques:

Bloc Québécois $758,350.39
Conservative Party of Canada $2,623,890.17
Green Party of Canada $324,231.20
Liberal Party of Canada $2,187,074.37
New Democratic Party $1,264,370.74

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