My friends Dan and Becky are, as Dan explains in a well-worded blog post, starting a venture called LearnToTravel designed to teach you how to become an independent traveler.

While I’m not entirely convinced that the best way to learn to become an independent traveler isn’t just throwing caution to the wind and going traveling, I also know that some people are just never going to do this: the great chasm of the unknown looms too great.

When Dan and Becky are trying to do, I think, is to plane off enough of the rough edges of your first trip to the point where you emerge confident enough to travel independently thereafter.

CBC launched a cross-platform re-branding of its news operation today. CBC Newsworld becomes CBC News Network, The National goes digital and mobile, and radio’s World Report gets a new host and a new feel. Central to the re-branding is complete graphic overhaul, and the heart of this is the use of Stag, a typeface originally commissioned for Esquire magazine and still the graphical heart of the magazine.

Stag is, I think, an excellent choice for the job, and the CBC has used it inventively.  It is a little odd, however, to see a typeface so associated with Esquire used so prominently elsewhere:

While looking through the collection of old videotapes in the collection of the Robertson Library at UPEI yesterday I came across and 1986 profile of Old Home Week reported by Scott Russell.  Part of the profile included an interview with a young Kevin “Boomer” Gallant:

Here, 23 years later, is slightly-older Boomer Gallant, in a full-page newspaper ad for [[Compass]] that appeared in today’s Guardian:

Update: The original UPEI cataloging record for the videotape listed it as being from 1976. When it turned out that Scott Russell would have been 18 years old if this were in fact the date – something helpful readers pointed out – Simon Lloyd at the Robertson Library dug further and found the date was incorrect: it was a 1986 profile.  I’ve updated the post accordingly.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before.

Back in 2007 I noted the existence, buried deep inside the Robertson Library at the University of PEI, of a mother lode of multimedia production gear, sitting under-loved and under-used, and lamented that word of such a powerful kit wasn’t being sung from the hills of Charlottetown.

This time around I’m determined to make sure that doesn’t happen, and the object of my determination this time around is the exciting new Collaboratory that opened recent in the library, this time in full public view and with absolutely no barriers to use.

I initially thought that collaboratory was a goofy-sounding name full of pretense (keep in mind that the previous venture was called Arts Netlantic). That is until I learned that this is a bona fide concept, not a locally-brewed-up name:

A collaboratory, as defined by William Wulf in 1989, is a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries”

Okay, so that is somewhat pretentious.

But it actually does some justice to what you’ll find in the space formerly occupied by the “Media Centre” in the library: what used to be a dusty collection of barely-working turntables and cassette players surrounded by a dusty collection of long-playing records has been transformed into a multimedia playground drenched in high-end Mac computers with huge cinema displays and all the analog-to-digital transforming gear you could ever wish for along with all the digital editing software you’d ever need to create a Hollywood movie.

And it’s just there, waiting for you to come and use it.  You don’t have to belong to the University, you don’t need a library card, you don’t need to sign up for anything, you don’t need a username or password: you just walk into the Library, go down the hall where the catalogue terminals are, turn left, and, blam, you’re in multimedia heaven ready to start creating.

Needless to say, I’ve been taking advantage of this new resource.  Here’s Oliver using the video editing machine to create a video for Climate Action Day:

And here’s the workstation that lets you convert old VHS videotapes into digital video files:

I went a little wild yesterday with the collection of VHS tapes that had been piling up in our cubbyholes since our last VCR broke down.  Among them I found a recording of the Charlottetown-hosted 1996 East Coast Music Awards, from which I pulled:

• Northumberland Strait Bridge Television Commercial
• Bruce Guthro and Natalie MacMaster, Fiddle & Bow
• IslandTel Commercial (featuring Fred Morash)
• Gene MacLellan tribute featuring Lennie Gallant, Marty Reno, Tara MacLean

Those are all raw multi-megabyte MP4 video files, so you might want to find fast Internet before downloading (another benefit of the Collaboratory: really, really fast Internet).

I encourage you to take advantage of this great new resource, and when you do I encourage you to let the library staff know that this is what they should be doing more of.

Oliver makes a video for International Day of Climate Action.

I stumbled across a very helpful tool this afternoon while visiting the CBC website: the Master Planner from CBC Media Sales and Marketing is a web application that lets you explore the ratings and audience size of CBC programs by market and demographic.

If I enter “Charlottetown” as the “Market,” for example, “CBC News at Six” as the “Program,” “Fall 2009” as the “Season” and select “A2+” (short for “all viewers”) as the demographic, I learn that 23% of televisions in the Charlottetown market were watching the Compass, representing an estimated audience of 31,500.

Splitting this up demographically, in the “lucrative 18-24” demographic the rating is to 5.4% and in the “55+” demographic it’s 41.8%.

I think that means that “a lot more old people watch Compass.”

By contrast, The National has a 2.9% share and an estimated audience of 4,050, the Rick Mercer Report has a 3.8% share and an audience of 5,500 and the Sunday morning airing of Coronation Street has a 1.9% share and an audience of 2,880.

Looking across the country, Compass’ counterparts (assuming they’re all tagged CBC News at Six) have the following ratings share:

• Vancouver, 0.7%
• Edmonton, 0.45%
• Calgary, 0.6%
• Regina, 1.05%
• Winnipeg, 3.9%
• Toronto, 0.8%
• Montreal, 2.2%
• Halifax, 5.15%
• St. John’s/Cornerbrook, 10.4%

This means that 10,000 more people are watching the CBC News at Six in Prince Edward Island than are watching the CBC News at Six in Montreal (despite the fact that Montreal is, well, bigger).

By ratings, the ten most popular shows for the CBC Charlottetown market are:

1. CBC News at Six (23.15%)
2. CBC News at Five (8.9%)
3. Jeopardy (6%)
4. Coronation Street Primetime (5.3%)
5. Hockey Night in Canada (5.3%)
6. Wheel of Fortune (4.7%)
7. Heartland (4%)
8. Rick Mercer Report (3.8%)
9. Nature of Things (3.6%)
10. Figure Skating Championships (3.5%)

By contrast the most popular programs in the CBC Toronto market are:

1. Jeopardy (4.3%)
2. Hockey Night in Canada (4.2%)
3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (3.41%)
4. Wheel of Fortune (3.38%)
5. Rick Mercer Report (2.9%)
6. Coronation Street Primetime (2.5%)
7. Happy Feet (2.5%)
8. Elf (2.3%)
9. Ron James Show (2.3%)
10. Best of Rick Mercer (2.1%)

Of those top 10 shows in Toronto, 3 are Hollywood movies, 2 are U.S. game shows, and 1 is a British soap. Only three are made-in-Canada: 2 Rick Mercers, a Ron James and the hockey.

So, it’s true what they say: lots of Prince Edward Islander’s watch Compass. 

You gotta wonder about the Jeopardy and the Wheel of Fortune though. I guess running those imports five times a week is what lets the 5,000 Islanders watch the Nature of Things on Sunday nights?

My main out-of-home way of interacting with Twitter is through the Tweetie application on my iPod Touch. And one of my favourite features of Tweetie is its ability to automatically translate tweets from other languages.  All I need to do is “swipe” the tweet in question, which calls up a set of icons; I click on the right-most one, click “Translate” and the tweet appears in English (or at least in Englishish) in a pop-up dialog:

Bonus tip: on an iPhone or iPod Touch you can take a screen shot by pressing the “sleep” button (on the top of the device) and the “home” button at the same time; the screen will flash briefly to show you that you’ve succeeded, and the next time you sync your device your screen shots will appear in iPhoto for download.

LoriJoySmith.com is back.  You can even buy stuff. Neato.

Soon after the school year started [[Oliver]] reported to me that he’d tried to access this website from one of the computers at [[Prince Street School]] and that he’d been blocked. I later heard from a friend with a spouse who teaches at a local high school that they’d run into a similar issue. 

And so over the past few weeks I’ve been learning a lot about Internet filtering in Prince Edward Island schools.

Internet filtering is a touchy subject with me, as in my heart of hearts I’m a strict information libertarian. Filtering the Internet is an effort that’s both ultimately futile, and takes our collective eyes off the real issue, which is outfitting our children to be their own information filters.

At the same time I know that’s a rather Utopian vision of information society, that it’s an almost impossible political sell to the culturally and spiritually squeamish, and that without some sort of filtering there would likely be no Internet in schools at all.  (I’ve also seen enough of the Internet’s seedier side to know that there are some things you can’t un-see, and I’m not sure what the answer to that is).

Which is all to say that I went into my “learning about Internet filters in schools” exercise with a mixture of open-minded curiousity and light moral indignation.

Here’s what I learned.

Back in the spring of 2007, the Province of PEI issued a tender for “the supply of a web filtering solution” (tender documents as a PDF). The “filtering solution” was to cover not only Prince Edward Island schools, but also computers within the public service and the health system; the successful bidder was a Guelph company called Netsweeper, not surprising as it was one of only two products that the tender pre-qualified (the other was Blue Coat).

Netsweeper’s content filtering methodology works, by their own description, as follows:

At the heart of the Netsweeper application resides an artificial intelligence engine that will categorise URLs in real-time based on actual website content.

When a user makes a request to the Internet, this request is intercepted and the URL is identified. The URL name is then sent to the Netsweeper Policy Server to determine what action is to be taken, meaning to allow or deny access at the site. If a user visits a website that is not in the local database, it is requested from the central database or the Content Naming Server (CNS). The CNS provides the information about the requested website to the Policy Server, which caches the information so as to be ready should the request ever be made again. This ensures that the Policy Server only has relevant URLs in its cache.

If the website requested by the end user is not in the CNS, the URL is sent to the categorisation engine that will download, scan and then categorise the page on demand. This category information will then be sent back through the chain to the Policy Server. This entire process happens in milliseconds, resulting in virtually no degradation in performance for the end user.

The categorisation system is also integrated with the Master CNS. As unknown URLs are found and categorised, the Master database is updated and will synchronise with all Policy Servers on a global level.    Today, this central database consists of over 1 billion unique URL addresses.

On a local level, the Department of Education developed a list of Netsweeper categories to which access would be denied (shown on this document in red), the end result being that when a teacher or student in a PEI school uses their browser to access a URL, the URL they entered is first handled by Netsweeper which determines the category it falls in, determines whether that category is on the “denied” list, and, depending on what it finds, either allows or denies access.

You can get a sense of how the categorization process works using the Test a Site tool on Netsweeper’s website.  This site, for example, is categorized under:

• Journals and Blogs
• Arts & Culture
• General News
• Sales
• Sports
• Travel
• Portals

With the exception of “sales,” “sports” and “portals” that’s a relatively accurate categorization (sports?!). 

None of the categories appear on the list of denied categories for PEI schools, so, in theory, this site should be available in schools.

And, sure enough, this morning I was able to confirm that, in fact, it is available: the technology coordinator at Prince Street School allowed me to test this in the school’s computer lab, and the site was accessible without issue. This means that either something has changed since Oliver originally tried earlier in the year, there was a non-related technical issue when he tried, or simply that he entered the address incorrectly. 

Irony aside, it’s good to know more about Internet filtering is set up inside schools; while I remain convinced that it’s wrong-headed, at least it’s not at least slightly more transparent.

This chair, part of an exhibition at the Danish Design Centre, signifies to me everything that is wrong with museums.  I mean, it’s a chair: to understand it you have to sit in it.  Otherwise, what’s the point.