Yesterday the OpenParliament site for Canadians, today an open data site for us. Like its parliamentary cousin, though, DataDotGc.ca is not, alas, a government initiative; rather, it’s the work of a group of private citizens led by David Eaves, a B.C. activist and public policy wonk. As they say on the site:

Unlike the United States (data.gov) and Britain (data.gov.uk), Canada has no open data strategy. This must change. Canadians paid for the information gathered about our country, ourselves and our government. Free access to it could help stimulate our economy and enhance our democracy. In pursuit of this

Just announced (by Tweet naturally) is that every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total in the last four years numbering in the billions.

The announcement is timed to coincide with the Twitter developers conference in California.

One wonders just how future researchers will grapple with all of this content. . . . [more]

Avast, me hearties, belay that snigger! The sons and daughters of Captain Kidd and Grace O’Malley are a plank closer to, well, having a proper plank of their own so that they can officially talk the talk. The Pirate Party of Canada has achieved “eligibility” status and seems likely to be able to field candidates a couple of months from now.

The rules respecting registration of federal political parties can be found here and are created by sections 366. – 403.42 of the Canada Elections Act (as amended in light of the Figueroa decision.

According to its website the . . . [more]

http://debatewise.org

“Debatewise was created for people who like making informed decisions. If this is you, you probably wont trust one source of information and will try to get a rounded view – which these days often means going to forums and blogs. The problem is, making sense of different opinions is time-consuming and imprecise.

What’s needed is a place where the best possible arguments for one side are listed next to the best possible arguments against. These arguments aren’t created by one person, but by like-minded individuals collaborating to form the strongest case. This allows people both to easily compare . . . [more]

A new site launched quietly a couple of days ago: Openparliament.ca is a great place to find out what’s going on in that house of mirrors on the hill. A voluntary effort by Michael Mulley, it offers you:

• Hansard, but formatted (finally!) in a way that is sensible, daily topic by daily topic, or, of course, by date
• a place to use your postal code to discover what your MP has been up to, including any Twitter posts, mentions in the press, and speeches in the House
• a list of all MPs, linked to their recent speeches in

Late last year, the RCMP changed its policy for access to criminal records information via the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC). Reputable companies, up until that point, had been able to obtain police records clearances through local police departments. These clearances were conditional upon the background checking company obtaining signed consent from the individual and making those consent forms available for spot audits. Provided the proper consent was obtained, background checking companies had been able to provide same-day results if the name, address and date of birth provided did not result in any “hits” in CPIC. In most cases, where . . . [more]

Ah, people! An endless source of interest, our fellow human beings are particularly fascinating to look at. The gaze is powerful, though, and staring is usually not socially permitted. This means that much of what we actually see of others outside our immediate circles is afforded by glimpses, hardly the best basis for soaking up the quiddities of “the other” and, perhaps, seeing oneself out there, too.

Photography comes to the rescue. And, to me at least, still photography offers something specially valuable, even though it freezes human motion. Maybe it provides the appropriate object for staring: still gaze, still . . . [more]

A recent small claims case in NS has reinforced the point that if you are thinking of getting a tattoo you might want to apply a spell-checker or perhaps you might want to stop using your spell checker so that your eye might be better trained to spot spelling mistakes. In this case the individual saw the preview of the word and the stencil on her arm where “beatiful” (aka beautiful) was spelled incorrectly. The adjudicator ruled that “…the Claimant is the author of her own misfortune. The Claimant saw the phrase on the computer, on the stencil and then . . . [more]

As a number of Slaw readers will already know, Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz digs up some great stuff. This week it was the news that the Internet Archive has added its 2 millionth free digital book.

The text chosen, Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent, has a bit of a Canadian angle too, in that it was donated by the University of Toronto.

It was also interesting to observe that the “manuscript was copied on parchment by at least three different scribes“. The journey of the text was jumping right from . . . [more]

Today is a holiday in Canada, and for Christians a solemn holiday. I thought that it might be appropriate for this Good Friday to offer you a site about life, life in all its splendid abundance and variety (1.9 million identified species, and growing). Moreover, it’s a site that, like so many nowadays, is built through the cooperative action of us — all of us, potentially.

Sensibly, the site is called the Encyclopedia of Life — with a nice, snappy URL that’s easy to remember: eol.org. But don’t think that this is some feel-good, amateur effort: the Encyclopedia is the . . . [more]

Tom Jenkins of Open Text spoke at the London TechAlliance “Gearing Up For Growth” conference yesterday about digital media in Canada. He likened the current position of traditional media (TV, newspapers) to town criers at the advent of the printing press. Here’s one of his slides.

Many are predicting the end of the newspaper. Newspapers are struggling trying to find a business model they can use in the digital world. It’s not uncommon for newspapers to try to erect paywalls, which require a paid subscription or a pay per view to read their content.

But that’s not going to work. . . . [more]

Here’s a wordy one today. Really wordy. But I thought that you might like to see an example of “old skool” ingenuity as it meets modern technology. I’m talking about the practice of cross-writing in letters. Once, postage was determined by the number of sheets within an envelope and not by weight — actually, I remember pre-stamped, blue, airmail letter “envelopes” that allowed for no enclosures and offered you only a single sheet to write on — and so the frugal took to cross-writing, i.e. turning the written-on page 90 degrees and simply writing across the earlier text. Surprisingly, the . . . [more]