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Wednesday, June 25
Saskaboom
by
Jason
on Wed 25 Jun 2008 10:54 PM CST
No, not the catchy Feist song...
Instead, "Saskaboom" was the name given to a feature that CBC's "The National" aired last night on Saskatchewan and our booming economy. The piece included a feature on Weyburn and the impact of the oil sector on the local economy. So if you want a taste of the city where I've spent most of the past year and a more positive spin on the Peak Oil idea that I wrote about the other day, watch the video clip. It was interesting to hear the Mayor of Weyburn talking about losing city employees to the oil patch. We're seeing something similar in our library region. I would say that traditionally, the bulk of our branch librarians were stay-at-home moms and housewives who were married to farmers or other people earning an average (or below-average in the case of most farmers  ) income. Now, with the booming natural resource-based economy, it's harder for us to find women wanting to supplement their family incomes because their husbands are making around six figures in "the patch". Or, if the wives do want to work, they can find higher paying employment with longer hours fairly easily since many gas stations and restaurants are offering $10-15/hr with all the hours you want just to get workers. (And lest anyone think I'm being sexist by talking only about female employees, I will mention that of the approximately 100 employees that SRL has out in its rural branch network, fully every single one of them - ie. 100% if you like easy math - are of the female persuasion. Sadly, the only males in the entire organization are the four professional librarians, our van driver and our shipping/receiving clerk.) In related news (to the "boom", not to the issue of "who has boobs"  ), Shea and I drove out to Stoughton, a town half an hour east of Weyburn for the local library's presentation on "Surface and Mineral Rights" as this is something that is of personal interest to both of us.
(I'll preface this by saying "as I understand it", since I always tend to get these things slightly wrong. But, basically, surface rights are where an oil company pays the landowner an annual fee for the right to be on your land as they explore for oil or for continued access after a well has been drilled. Mineral rights are when you earn a percentage from any producing wells that are found on your land. Mineral rights are, by far, the more lucrative although someone with a few producing wells on their land could make a decent annual wage, just from the surface rights.) Now, a quick quiz - what's the most successful library program you've ever attended? How about 150 people in a community hall where said community has 653 people according to the last census? Of course, they'd advertised quite widely and a lot of attendees, including Shea and I, were from out of town. But still, that'd be like getting 45 000 people out to a library program in Regina! (Hmm, maybe the RPL should become the RidersPL?)There's definitely a lesson in there about running programs that meet your community needs no matter the size of your community. Plus, the opportunity to promote the library and its services is huge, especially for a non-standard program like this. (Although it was embarrasing to hear one Government employee who was presenting ask, "Do you have Internet in the library here? I know we do in Regina but I'm not sure about here." Ouch!)
Anyhow, I'm off to sing myself to sleep...
Old dirt road,
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
knee deep snow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
o-o-o-o-old
Saturday, June 21
A Peek at Peak Oil
by
Jason
on Sat 21 Jun 2008 09:37 PM CST
Peak Oil is a theory that is increasingly relevant as the price of oil and gasoline continue to skyrocket. It was first proposed in the 1950's by an American geoscientist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell in Texas and correctly predicted that the supplies of oil were limited in the United States and extraction would peak at some point in the late 1960's then fall afterwards. This theory was later applied to world supplies of oil with the prediction for when peak oil would occur worldwide ranging anywhere from 2010 to "never" depending on which study you read. (The "never" people are the ones who claim that oil is produced continually by internal earth processes and are sort of like the folks who still deny climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)
MetaFilter recently had a thread about an International Agency study of 400 oil fields that found that, barring a substantial decrease in demand, the world would face an oil
supply shortfall of 12.5 million barrels a day by 2015 or 15% of current
production.On the contrary, even people who agree with the idea of peak oil and don't think it'll bubble from the ground forever, point out that improvements in technology and/or the rising price of oil will lead to more finds or re-approaching fields that were previously unfeasible or thought to be tapped. But with massively increasing demand from China, India and other developing nations, the odds are that either technology or the promise of massive profits inherent in $200 (or $300 or more) barrels of oil still won't be enough to meet demand. (Oil is at $135/barrel today which is an increase of about 35% since the start of 2008, nearly double what it was at this time last year and seven times the $20/barrel price that oil hovered for most of the 1980's and 1990's.)So instead of gas that's $1.39/litre (~$4/gallon in the US) today, you could be looking at $4-5/litre gasoline ($15/gallon) in the very near future.The other related issue is, of course, climate change. Even if the earth did have unlimited supplies of oil, there has to be consideration of what the burning of so many fossil fuels are doing to our environment. (A digression - "fossil fuels" is a bit of a misnomer and many people think that oil fields are like the dinosaur version of elephant graveyards. The reality is that oil fields were likely produced, not by dinosaurs but ancient micro-organisms and foliage. A great way to understand this that I read somewhere: the weight of all the ants on earth is more than the weight of all elephants.)Ethanol isn't the solution because, although it is renewable since it is fuel made from crops such as sugar cane and maize, it still involves burning which harms the environment plus it drives up the cost of those basic food crops. (Mexico recently capped the prices for tortillas.)The role of speculators, both in driving up the prices of food crops (see the last linked article) and of oil itself, can't be ignored either. In fact, there are some that think the huge increase in oil prices in the last year doesn't have anything to do with peak oil and is completely based on self-fulfilling speculator prophecies (if you bet millions that the price of oil will go up, that will push the price up which leads other speculators to do the same and it becomes a vicious cycle which only end with a massive crash which will make 1929 look like a 16-year old learning to drive versus the coming crash which would be more like Evil Kinevil jumping over a canyon and not quite making it.) Why am I writing this now? I've always been interested in the idea of Peak Oil for all the different areas it brings into contact - economics, environmentalism, politics, geology, etc. - but now that the Saskatchewan economy is booming due to our oil and other natural resources, and having spent the last year living in the epicentre of the Saskatchewan oil & gas industry (Weyburn-Estevan), it's hitting especially close to homebi-. (out of curiosity, I even went to the bi-annual Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Show in Weyburn last year - a place I never thought I'd find myself!)Recent studies have declared that there is a "Saudi Arabia of oil" under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota and Montana in the Bakken and Torquay formations (the blogger who posted the image below has downsized his initial estimate but it's still apparently the largest find in Canada since 1957). I drove out to Shea's farm with her family a few months ago and we didn't recognize the area. The landscape now looks like the moon - instead of the never-ending greens, yellows and browns of the farm fields, there is just endless, flattened, black earth covered in rows of pumpjacks.
I've got a lot more that I could say but I hear a baby crying so I might come back to this topic later. I do hope this has given you an introduction if you didn't know about peak oil and maybe some more info if you do!
Thursday, June 19
Kellogg's = Geneus!
by
Jason
on Thu 19 Jun 2008 11:08 PM CST
Having recently sustained fairly serious knee lacerations due to some new "smaller than Mega-Blocks but not as small as regular Lego" Legos that Pace got for this birthday, this story has a particular resonance for me right now in terms of the danger potential of Lego and its myriad affiliated products.
Sunday, June 15
Pledge For Firefox 3.0 Download Day - June 17, 2008
by
Jason
on Sun 15 Jun 2008 09:48 PM CST
Firefox 3.0, the latest version of the popular open source web browser, is attempting to set a world record for software downloads in a single day. On Tuesday June 17, over 1.3 million people (as of this writing) have pledged to download the new version of the software. I've been using a beta release of the software for a month or so and have to say it's a massive improvement over the current release. More info (including a very cool map showing how many people have pledged per country) is available here: Spread Firefox | Download Day 2008
Saturday, June 14
Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic
by
Jason
on Sat 14 Jun 2008 11:53 PM CST
This is how I sometimes feel...My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not
thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m
reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be
easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the
argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of
prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often
starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the
thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always
dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used
to come naturally has become a struggle.Check out this great article from The Atlantic Online which talks about how people read, how they do research and how that's changing in the age of the Internet among many other related topics that are covered.The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected
in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.
When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their
brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we
have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the
changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to
our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological
level. Where does Google fit in all of this?The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing
machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the
network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across
the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more
opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information
about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the
commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of
data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the
better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely
reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest
to drive us to distraction.
Lots to think about!
(via MetaFilter)
Monday, May 26
Kiva.org
by
Jason
on Mon 26 May 2008 10:09 PM CST
Kiva is a web site that helps facilitate micro-credit loans to entrepreneurs around the world. (As always, Wikipedia has more information about this organization if you're interested.) Shea got a Kiva gift certificate as a Mother's Day Gift and is helping two people: Ruth Celenia Santana Morales who sells clothes and jewelery in the Dominican Republic and Umedjon Nurov who raises beef cattle in Tajikistan. One of the coolest things about the site is that once the loan is repaid (the loans have a 99.7% repayment rate) you can either withdraw it or turn around and loan it to someone else.I first heard about Kiva via the Bill Clinton book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change The World. There are various other organizations out there that are similar to Kiva but which have different approaches and cater to different needs, groups, countries and so on. Heifer International is one I heard about via Cenobyte for example.
Friday, May 23
Friday Fun Link - Spectra Visual Newsreader (and Some Thoughts on Some Other, More World-Changing Future Technologies) (May 23, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 23 May 2008 11:39 PM CST
Spectra is a new visual news reader from MSNBC. I haven't played around with it much but it looks cool, mostly because the news spins in a circle instead of the old-fashioned columnar approach. Whoo-hooo! On a much broader scale, I've recently come across a couple lists predicting of technologies that will change the world put together by groups that know a thing or two about cutting-edge technology. IBM has posted their second annual "Five in Five" list and MIT's "Technology Review" journal has posted their list of "10 Emerging Technologies for 2008".
What's especially cool about the MIT list is that you can click to past lists going back to 2001 (excepting 2002 when their super-secret crystal ball technology apparently broke down) to see if their predictions have come true yet or not.
Here's the 2001 list and I won't be so presumptuous as to pretend I have a clue as to where the world is at with most of these (or even what some of them mean!).
Brain-Machine Interface
Flexible Transistors
Data Mining
Digital Rights Management
Biometrics
Natural Language Processing
Microphotonics
Untangling Code
Robot Design
Microfluidics
But some, like data mining and DRM are definitely ones people involved in the information world are struggling with now.
One final thought...my own bold prediction for the future.
At some point in the very near or not so near future, people will begin to wear a small recording device that constantly captures the video and audio of every moment of their lives. This will be stored by some sort of advanced system (think Google on crack - voice recognition, natural language processing, high level artificial intelligence) that allows people to search for pretty much any type of information about their lives instantaneously: "what did I have for lunch in that cafe in Montreal in 2009?", "where did I leave my sunglasses?", "how much have I spent on gas in the last 12 months?"
I recently heard about U of T engineering prof Steve Mann during Michael Ridley's presentation at the SLA conference and he's been on this path for, oh, almost thirty years already.
I also came across an article (which I didn't bookmark and can't find now but maybe it was in Wired?) about somebody else who was doing something similar - wearing a computer that could OCR things he looked at like his hotel and flight reservation then transfer it into a database for easy retrieval later. I think there was also a web site that performed this function for him or that was trying to do something similar for people mentioned in the article but again, can't remember the name of it. Not keyhole.com but maybe something like that? [Edit: Found it. Twine.com]
Oh, and I'll
also predict that the natural reluctance people feel towards this
privacy-destroying, possibly society-altering device will be no different than the acceptance rate for any other new invention.
[2008-06-29 - Edit #2 - I don't think Twine was what I was thinking of. Here's the article from Salon about someone using a technology called Evernote that I think was what I was looking for originally. And while I'm adding stuff, here's a story about how new technologies will eventually allow us to add 1 TB of data on a thumbdrive. Doesn't this sound exactly like I what I'm talking about: ""All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go
away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it."]
Thursday, April 3
Hungry Planet: What The World Eats
by
Jason
on Thu 03 Apr 2008 07:26 PM CST
Sunday, March 30
Five Things The Internet Is Killing (and One It Isn't)
by
Jason
on Sun 30 Mar 2008 09:13 PM CST
Talking about some of the most useful sites online during the past three months mixed with my ongoing interest in online broadcasting inspired me come up with the following list:Five Things The Internet Is Killing1. The Music Industry- I saw a stat somewhere that 80% (!) of teens in the US hadn't bought a single CD in the last year. That's not a good sign if your (inflexible) business model is selling overpriced CD's!2. The Movie Industry- see above. It's a bit slower death since the file sizes are bigger and it's harder for the average user to get high quality video displayed in an enjoyable format compared to outputting high quality music to a stereo or even just decent speakers from a computer. 3. Real Estate Agents- I keep hearing these commercials that slam "do it yourself" real estate sales sites while talking about all the expertise a realtor brings you. Frankly, they reek of desperation. Selling or buying a home yourself is a natural for the strengths of the Internet - many-to-many reach, incredible cost savings (realtors usually charge around 7% for their service), unlimited space for featuring photos and specifications. Plus, ultimately, who's going to care the most about selling a property - the person who sees it as a house or the person who sees it as a home?4. Traditional Software- increasingly, people are using online applications that they don't need to buy, install or update instead of their more traditional cousins. MS-Office is the most obvious example of software that Google and others are trying to replicate online but I don't think it'll be long before pretty much everything you do locally on your computer is available online and the only piece of software you'll need is a web browser.5. Newspapers- I think classified ad revenue is down something like 20%, subscribers are down 15% in the last few years (disclaimer: all stats quoted in this and any other post I do - are usually from memory. Don't quote them in your academic papers without verifying them!) Online competitors now provide news that is interactive, has alternative perspectives and is more timely. Some newspapers are migrating online but still use old school subscription models or pay-per-article (boo G&M after what, a week?) The New York Times gets it right - all their content is available as soon as it's published, its archived, searchable and free.Bonus: One Thing The Internet Is Not Killing Books- outside of music, more ink (real and digital) is spilled proclaiming the death of the book than anything else. To paraphrase Twain, "the rumours of [the book's] death are greatly exaggerated." I'll always remember going to a national publishers' conference in 2000 where the e-book was all the talk and one presenter said that by 2005, more than half of readers would be using e-books over regular books. Really? Even most of the tech-types I know don't use e-books yet. I don't think e-books aren't without their merits and we're heading to more of a Movie-Television relationship. When TV first came out in the 1940's-50's, commentators warned about the death of the movie theatre. Instead, they developed a symbiotic relationship. I think that's what will happen with "real" books and e-books. E-books will continue to gain traction with users but also continue to co-exist with traditional books. (Here's an article I found on this topic which discusses many of the same ideas I'm talking about.)
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