I’ve been spending some time swimming through Statistics Canada’s 2006 Community Profiles. Something that drew my attention when looking through the O’Leary, PEI profile was the small number of immigrants who live there: of a total population of 835, only 10 are immigrants — 1.2% — and they all immigrated before 1991.

How does this compare to multicultural Charlottetown? Out of a total population of 31,295 we have 1,480 immigrants. Or 4.7%.

If you want to enter the realm of the truly bizarre, consider Tyne Valley, PEI: in a total population of 210, there are no immigrants living there. Indeed of the 180 people over 15 in Tyne Valley, all of them at least 3rd generation Canadians.

For Prince Edward Island as a whole, a population of 134,205, there are 4,785 immigrants, or 3.6%.

By way of comparison, Toronto, Ontario has a population of 2,476,565, with 1,237,720 immigrants. Or almost exactly 50%.

Statistics Canada defines “immigrants” as:

…persons who are, or have ever been, landed immigrants in Canada. A landed immigrant is a person who has been granted the right to live in Canada permanently by immigration authorities. Some immigrants have resided in Canada for a number of years, while others are more recent arrivals. Most immigrants are born outside Canada, but a small number were born in Canada.

The statistics of ethnicity from the 2006 Census get released into the Community Profiles on April 4, 2008.

In Nice Work If You Can Get It, last week’s episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass interviews NASA astronauts about the details of their jobs. He asks a brilliant question:

So it’s the day you get back from a Shuttle mission… are their special weird forms that you have to fill out on that day?

This is the kind of question that only an deeply curious person could ask. He gets a good answer.

Because I have clients in the publishing trade, clients that are beginning to embrace weblogs, when The New York Times announced that their Director of Copy Desks would be answering reader questions this week, I had to send one in:

I am interest in knowing whether New York Times weblogs are treated differently than standard news content when it comes to copy editing. One of the promises of blogs is that they “disintermediate” the connection between writer and reader. How do you make sure this disintermediation doesn’t result in unreadable copy, especially for writers who are otherwise excellent journalists but who suffer from poor spelling or grammar?

You can read her response — along with a bunch of other interesting questions and answers — on this week’s Talk to the Newsroom page.

I’ve taken the me-specific Yahoo Pipe and created a generic Your Recent Plazes Presences on a Map pipe that anyone can use (just enter your Plazes username, or any Plazes username).

As described in this blog post with accompanying video, it’s now very easy to embed the output of Yahoo Pipes into, well, anywhere.

For example, I created a Plazes Feed Mashup Pipe that takes the XML of my most recent 100 Plazes presences, massages the XML into something resembling RSS, and then outputs the result on a Yahoo Map.

(There used to be a Yahoo-Pipres-generated map here; but then Pipes went away. Leaving the post here for posterity).

In 2006 I mentioned how I’d been attracted to Trent University back in the mid-1980s by a recruiting film that featured a Jeep. As I wrote then, the film:

…told the story of a student arriving at Trent for the first time. She arrived in her cool Jeep, and as she pulled into the parking lot a gaggle of fresh-faced coeds emerged to help her move in. She then proceeded to benefit greatly from small-group teaching, stunning architecture and the proximity to the Trent Canal.

A few weeks ago I decided that I needed to seek out the film. It’s been almost 25 years since I would have seen it, but I figured that it was an important enough artifact to have been saved somewhere.

Alas I heard back from the Trent University Archives that they don’t have a copy in their collection, and I heard back today from a friend at Trent who works in communications that the Registrar’s Office doesn’t have a copy either. She writes “There was a box of old films that was destroyed during the flood, so that might explain why we no longer have record of it.”

It appears, thus, that I will have to keep the memory of the film alive in my imagination. If you went to Trent in the 1980s, to you remember this film? Maybe I made it up?

I’ve been recruited to perform a pre-conference workshop at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference in May. Here’s the draft description I’ve come up with for my session, titled tentatively The Wearable OPAC: An Extended Improvisation on Open Source:

For me, the greatest innovation in library technology in recent years has been the miniature public library card that clips to my key chain. This small innovation has completely changed my relationship with my library card, and thus my library: what was once a revered object, a sort of “golden ticket,” is now a ubiquitous extension of my person. It’s wearable.

Taking this innovation as a jumping-off point, we’ll consider how the library catalogue could make a similar conceptual leap: what if we could wear the OPAC.

Clip it to our key chain, or slip it into our pocket, or throw if over our shoulder. What would a ubiquitous personal library catalogue look like, feel like, and how could it change our relationship to the library?

Such an approach — decentralized, cheap, omnipresent, connected, social — demands an open approach to technology, moving the focus away the deified, proprietary, impersonal, behemothic and toward the commonplace, open source, personal and disposable.

What if we wore our OPAC like socks, rather than visiting it like church?

Over the course of an afternoon we’ll engage in real world experiments to actually create such a thing.

Using small bits of cheap technology together with open source tools, databases, and programming languages, we’ll stitch together a proof-of-concept wearable OPAC. And in doing so we’ll ruminate on open source and its potential application in libraries, both in terms of its ability to free libraries from the tyranny of technology vendors, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the hope that it offers to mutate the relationships between the institution, its technologies, its librarians and its patrons.

Participants are encouraged, but not required, to bring a wifi-enabled laptop or handheld device. No experience with open source, programming, or library technology is required. An open mind, and a willingness to suspend any latent fears of or reverence for technology is recommended. This is neither a speech on open source nor a training session; think of it as an interactive performance piece.

Non-librarian civilians are welcome to attend; you can register on the APLA website. The cost is $50.

By the way, before this blog post, Google showed no results for the search wearable OPAC. So I’ve coined a new phrase.

Try this: go out and get a Mars Dark chocolate bar (in a pinch you can settle for a regular Mars). Take it home and put it in the fridge. Wait a few hours. Eat. It’s a completely transformed chocolate experience.

There’s a Vespa Ape for sale on eBay today, in Tacoma, Washington. Neato.

Just noticed that there’s now an official RSS feed of new titles for the PEI Provincial Library. Cool.