The Atlantic Journalism Award finalists were announced this morning, and the Halifax Examiner has three nominations.
It is very satisfying to see Examiner writers recognized for the good work they do. This work is made possible by your subscriptions, as the Examiner does not carry advertising of any kind. Please subscribe here.
Charles P. Allen high school will open late today, after two staff members were stabbed yesterday.
CBC reports:
Lindsey Bunin,a spokesperson for Halifax Regional Centre for Education, said earlier on Monday twostaff were taken to hospital after being injured in an incident with a student who did have a weapon.She said the third person who was injured was the student.
At the Chronicle Herald, Andrew Rankin writes:
Halifax Regional Centre for Education said later that two staff memberswere injured and taken to hospital following an incident involving a student with a weapon.
Spokesperson Lindsey Bunin said three individuals two staff members and one student were transported to hospital.
Rankin speaks with students at the school who are, of course, shocked by the events. He writes that one student said it appeared that the schools vice-principal and receptionist were being stretchered out from the school and placed in ambulances. The boy was also moved from the police car into an ambulance.
I learned about the stabbings on social media as, it seems, did many parents, some of whom were critical of HRCE communications. It seems inevitable though that word would get out first through personal networks. That said, our institutions seem to default to give the least information possible mode, which is often not helpful particularly in a crisis.
Again, from Rankins story:
The Chronicle Herald spoke to another parent who received two texts and two emails from HRCE about the incident. We obtained a copy of the texts showing that the first text was sent out at 10:07 a.m. It said: CP in hold and secure.
The second one came soon after, saying the school was closing for the day. Both texts indicated that an additional email would be sent. The woman asked not to be identified. She said the emails contained no information about what had happened at the school.
Classes at CPA are cancelled for today.
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The provincial government is finally putting some money where its mouth is by offering substantial bonuses to nurses, Jennifer Henderson reports:
Surrounded by nurses and therapists working at the Dartmouth General Hospital, Premier Tim Houston and Health Minister Michelle Thompson announced $10,000 retention bonuses aimed at stemming the rising tide of departures among burnt out front-line workers.
For 11,000 registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and nurse practitioners working in hospitals, nursing homes, and schools the cheque should be in the mail within the next month
In addition to the $10,000 the government is offering immediately, nurses who sign an agreement next March will receive another $10,000 if they promise to stay and work two more years, until 2026.
Henderson says to expect more health care announcements today.
Click here to read Nurses to receive $10,000 bonus, offered a second $10,000 if they stay two more years.
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Yvette dEntremont has a lovely story on the new documentary Raconte-moi un souvenir(Tell me a memory), about growing up in Pubnico between 1930 and 1950. The film is based on stories told by seniors in the community. dEntremont writes:
My father was born in Pubnico in 1941. He died in 2018, and this was the Acadian childhood he wouldve experienced. I have a connection to this place and its stories, but even without it Id have been hooked
The documentarys creator and artistic director, Yvette dEntremont, said the screening felt like a huge family picnic or reunion where everyone was watching family videos.
Lots of people from not even from that generation but maybe 10 or 20 years younger were nodding their heads in the theatre, recognizing themselves in some of their stories even though they werent that old, dEntremont said in an interview.
Its (the documentary) for generations to come. Its a legacy, and that is so important for our young people.
For the record, dEntremont is the second person with my name that Ive interviewed in my career, and we arent related.
Reading this piece, I realized I interviewed the director of the film several years ago, just after she retired from teaching, and one of her preoccupations was the decline of French among students. That concern certainly fits in with her goals for the film. From dEntremonts story:
One thing dEntremont hopes people take away from the documentary is the importance of preserving family and community stories.
I hope it triggers curiosity so that when younger people visit their grandparents or great grandparents, they will ask about these things, what life was like, tell me stories about when you were young. I hope this encourages that, she said.
Their stories become our history forever. We learn from the past, we learn that we were all kids at one point and we all have valuable stories to tell. These seniors have wonderful stories to tell, and they have something important and valuable to share with us. We should never forget that.
Click here to read Their stories become our history forever: Pubnico seniors share memories in new film.
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In a piece published last week, Mary Campbell of the Cape Breton Spectator compares how CBRM council deals with rinks vs housing.
In a dig at secrecy surrounding councils housing discussion, Campbell writes:
They are so much happier talking about rinks, they dont even mind doing it in public. They just relate more to rinks: they love the volunteer boards that oversee them, they respect the hard work of the people who operate them and they freely acknowledge the needs of the people who use them.
They get to talk about volunteers who put their heart and soul into rinks and reminisce about their own time coaching Major Bantam hockey. They get to shudder imagining what would happen if the community rink closed. And then they get to vote to take the rink over, at a cost of $250,000 annually.
How does spending a quarter of a million dollars on the rink compare to spending a quarter of a million in a couple of other areas? Campbell writes:
District 5 Councilor Eldon MacDonald, who expressed something akin to horror at the mere possibility the CBRM might be on the hook for cost over-runs or operational expenses associated with a supportive housing project proposed by New Dawn and the Ally Centre, agreed to take on the quarter million dollar subsidy for a rink without batting an eye. (Not to mention the general consternation caused by the estimated operating costs for a new central library which, at up to $240,000 would belessthan the rink subsidy.)
Campbell discusses the history of the rink, and how it got into financial trouble, and she makes clear shes not against rinks! I think the end of her piece nicely sums up the issues, though:
Council will probably argue that the difference between this debate and the debate over supportive housing is that recreation is clearly a municipal responsibility and housing is not, but I have two things to say about that.
First, recreation may be a municipal responsibility, but the Emera Centre was not a CBRM facility, so taking it over involved going above and beyond the municipalitys responsibilities.
And second, when the federal government gives you $5 million for housing, housing becomes your responsibility, and if you are not capable of accepting that responsibility, if you cannot rise to that challenge, then you should not be in government.
I dont actually begrudge the Emera Centre this lifeline and I do understand the value of rinks to communities but if you can see the value in a rink, then you should also be able to see the value in housing for your most vulnerable citizens. How can the Emera Centre be a gift to the CBRM and $5 million from the federal government a burden?
Recreation and access to recreation are core municipal services and they should be run that way.
Like the Halifax Examiner, the Cape Breton Spectator is supported by readers like you and me. You can subscribe here.
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At CBC, Paul Palmeter reports that Sustainable Marine Energy Canada has given up on its Minas Passage tidal generation project.
The companys project would have used floating turbines. Previous projects involving turbines on the ocean floor have failed.
Sustainable Marine Energy Canada CEO Jason Hayman tells Palmeter the company is withdrawing because it hasnt been able to get regulatory approval from DFO:
We have been working for about three years to get an authorization from DFO to deliver our project, but we are basically coming up against a brick wall.
DFO did not get back to Palmeter, but others he interviews use the term clear path in terms of whats lacking for regulatory approval of tidal power projects.
I have no idea if DFO is being obstructionist, cautious, incompetent, short-sighted, or rightly concerned about impacts. I do know that whenever I see businesses complain about red tape at least some scepticism is warranted.
Palmeter also published a story earlier this month on the BigMoon Power tidal project, which is still in its early stages.
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Last week, Tim Bousquet wrote about media running pieces for rage clicks:
The rage-inducing is intentional: it gets the article shared on social media, with people saying stuff like can you believe these assholes? and thousands more people click on the article, upping the all-important CPMs, the cost per million impressions on which advertising revenue is based
Anyway, just something else to be aware of: if an article pisses you off, its probably doing so intentionally.
This is the world we live in. Everything, even our anger, is commodified.
You can find examples of this pretty much any day of the week. The middle manager at Meta (which owns Facebook) pissed off that they may not be making $1 million/year soon, as they had planned. Or the NYU student who spent a year in Florence and hated it, for incoherent reasons, including that the locals didnt fit her stereotypes, her house was too crowded, and when her roommates went away for the weekend her house was too empty.
The NYU student story was terrible and painful to read, and it followed a typical trajectory: publication posts story, story gets shared around by people hating on it, other media pick it up and write about how people online are mad about this story. The NYU students story got an extra bump because Amanda Knox (who was convicted of murdering her roommate while on a student exchange in Italy, before being exonerated) retweeted a link to the story.
There was a time when I would have gleefully piled on too, but Ive seen so many of these by now that I mostly feel anger at the editors who are willing to let young writers hang themselves out to dry for the benefit of a days notoriety and bunch of clicks.
I became aware of the NYU student story because a Greek sociologist I follow on Mastodon shared a link to it. (He seems to have since deleted the post.) I was tempted to share it and say something snarky thereby helping to perpetuate the rage-click economy but Mastodon disincentivizes this, because there is no equivalent to the quote-tweet feature, making it harder to just dunk on people. Curious, I logged in to Twitter, where, of course, the NYU student was the main character of the day (and, subsequently, had locked her account.)
Over the weekend, Mastodon passed 10 million users. Last November, it seemed like a big deal when it broke one million. (These numbers are the source of some debate, but whats undeniable is that the network is growing rapidly.)
This is interesting, insofar as Mastodon is expressly designed to suppress features that drive other social networks. It deliberately makes searching posts difficult, shows you a purely chronological timeline (meaning the most rage-inducing content isnt pushed to you) and it limits the number of times you see boosted posts. So if people are sharing the same link say, to a story by an NYU student over how she hated Florence over and over and over, you only see a small fraction of those boosts.
Mastodon is part of what is called the Fediverse: a collection of decentralized, non-commercial services that can connect to each other (also known as federating). Some have analogues to the world of commercial social media. Pixelfed allows you to share photos, BookWyrm is the non-commercial Goodreads, Friendica is designed to fulfill some of the same functions as that other behemoth whose name starts with F, and so on.
During my time in the Fediverse (basically, since last November), Ive been struck by how difficult it is for people to wrap their heads around the idea of a non-commercial, decentralized internet even though this is exactly how the internet started out. Ive seen Mastodon referred to as a website, and its creator, Eugen Rochko, referred to as its owner. One notorious article said Twitter had blocked links to John Mastodon, the founder of a competing social media company named after himself. Needless to say, there is no John Mastodon.
But Mastodon, by its nature, cant be owned by anyone. The best simple explanation Ive seen of the Fediverse (of which Mastodon is a part) is by Matthew S. Smith, writing in the IEEE Spectrum. (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)
Smith writes:
The Fediverse, unlike the social networks that rose to dominance over the last two decades, is a decentralized collection of servers that communicate over an open protocol
Mastodon, unlike Twitter, is not hosted as a singular service but instead a collection of independent servers that communicate through [the] ActivityPub [protocol]. Joining Mastodon means joining a server with its own community and code of conduct. Users can interact with users on other servers, but their account is hosted on the server they choose
The Fediverses connected but independent servers give users more control. Everyone has the option to join the server they think best, and moving to a new server is relatively simple. Servers can also block other servers, providing more power to respond against harassment or objectionable content.
Ive seen a few good examples of how this setup disincentivizes going for outrage. Last year, Raspberry Pi created its own Mastodon server and soon after began essentially trolling people who were upset that one of its employees had bragged about being a former cop and using Raspberry Pi devices for surveillance. On Twitter, this trolling strategy would probably have worked, because people would have shared the tweets in outrage. On Mastodon, by contrast, the organizations server simply wound up being de-federated, or blocked, by many users, meaning hardly anyone saw their posts.
When I described Mastodon to someone I know a few months ago, he quickly replied with, If youre not a paying customer, youre the product. Ive used this adage myself, many times, but the fact is it is simply not true. We can actually create relationships and networks in which we are neither customer nor product. Worse, with many services we are now both the customer and the product. You can provide a whole bunch of content to Facebook for free, and it will want to charge you 15 bucks a month to verify you.
The internet was built on decentralization the reason the US military funded its development was so that a nuclear attack couldnt knock out a centralized system but over the past couple of decades weve come to see a venture capital backed ecosystem, centralization, and scale as the primary ways to approach it and to measure success.
Back in 1999, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson (who coined the term metaverse) wrote an essay called In the beginning was the command line. Stephenson draws an analogy between the makers of operating systems and car dealerships:
One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success.
Across the road are two other dealerships, the now-defunct BeOS, and Linux:
Linux is not a business at all. Its a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Stephenson later became a fan of Macs, but I still like this analogy as a way to look at not just operating systems, but also the organization of the internet.
Many of the complaints about Mastodon its hard for businesses to reach an audience because you cant advertise, its too easy to block users and whole servers, its hard to go viral seem like advantages to me.
Sure, Mastodon is far from perfect. And it is only one of many Fediverse services. But I think the most important thing is that it, and the rest of the Fediverse, represents a new approach at a time when we desperately need new approaches.
As Molly White (best known as a cryptocurrency sceptic) wrote after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank:
We are coming to a point, I think, where the shine is wearing off. People are realizing that despite the hundreds of billions of dollars being deployed each year by venture capital firms in pursuit of innovation, the world doesnt really feel hundreds of billions of dollars better off for it. For all the talk of unbridled innovation, venture capital services only very specifictypesof innovation: those that stand to produce large exits for investors, and with relatively low risk, regardless of whether the business itself holds much promise or provides any societal benefit. As Edward Ongweso Jr.writesforSlate:
For the past 10 years venture capitalists have had near-perfect laboratory conditions to create a lot of money and make the world a much better place. And yet, some of their proudest accomplishments that have attracted some of the most eye-watering sums have been: 1) chasing the dream of zeroing out labor costs while monopolizing a sector to charge the highest price possible (A.I. and the gig economy); 2) creating infrastructure for speculating on digital assets that will be used to commodify more and more of our daily lives (cryptocurrency and the metaverse); and 3) militarizing public space, or helping bolster police and military operations.
We are overdue as a society for seriously questioning what has become, but what has not always been, the dominant model of innovation. Recent weeks have drawn a bold underline beneath what has been clear to many for a long time: that those controlling massive amounts of capital and power in our society are not the smartest, or most level-headed, or most altruistic among us. Venture capital may be the best way to serve the interests of capital, but we need to consider alternative models that prioritize the interests ofpeople.
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Everyday items encode and embody all kinds of assumptions, ranging from the personal to the broadly cultural. And they can carry meanings for some to which others are completely oblivious.
Take pinball machines, for example. From the representation of women in backglass and playfield art, to the Winners dont use drugs messages scrolling across the screens of 1980s and 1990s machines, the machines tell us a lot about the cultures from which they emerged, and about assumptions about their target markets.
The Dolly Parton pinball machine is interesting in this regard. I was at the Propeller Arcade on Gottingen twice recently, and noticed they had a Dolly Parton pinball machine. I last saw one of these four years ago in Athens, and I was intrigued enough to look up its history.
Wouldnt you know it, the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College in Kentucky has an interesting virtual exhibit on this pinball machine. Its called Dolly Parton Pinball Machine in the Appalachian Collections: A virtual exhibit about the 1979 Dolly Parton pinball machine and its backstory one Appalachian womans wrestling with fame, her image, and her mountain identity.
In 1977, pinball manufacturer Bally decided it wanted to feature Dolly Parton on a pinball machine. Parton was very much a country singer at the time, and had not crossed over to become a bigger phenomenon yet. The original design of the backglass art reflected this down-home country image.
But this image would not wind up on the backglass. Parton was leaving her country roots behind and going more mainstream. In 2013, the Appalachian Centers curator wrote to artist Dave Christensen and asked about the changes to the art requested by Partons team. Christensen replied:
The initial finished prototype showed Dolly in a typical Blue Ridge country setting. She was wearing a sexy, low cut plaid gingham blouse, cut-off blue jean shorts, a big fancy hair-do, playing a country guitar. It was approved by Dolly herself. Just as it was scheduled for production hernewHollywood Ca. MGR. . . . wanted her to be portrayed more cosmopolitan, a crossover artist
But it wasnt just the manager. Parton herself very much wanted to change her image. The exhibit quotes her from a 1977 interview with Barbara Walters:
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Mastodon hits 10 million users: Is decentralization the future? - Halifax Examiner
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