INDEV students are a tight-knit group. Most of them spent their first year together at St. Paul’s University College, and with a class size of 23, it’s not hard to get to know everyone. But some students have found that being guinea pigs in a new program has its downsides as well.

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“It felt like they were telling me, ‘If you can’t survive this, you shouldn’t work in the field,’” said Allison. After six weeks of further discussion, INDEV staff urged her to come home on account of her pressing health concerns. But, four months away from graduation, they would not provide her with an alternate way to complete the degree requirements. This question was left hanging, and only added to Allison’s burden.

Read the full article

Word on the street is that the INDEV administration is looking to beef up their contingency plans in response to this article, so hopefully they go through with substantial changes and include students in the decision-making process.

Government-employed scientists aren’t allowed to talk to the media? Oh, employee censorship is a common practice in any organization.

Recklessly speeding through the pipeline environmental review process? Oh, don’t worry, the only people concerned are radical foreign environmentalists.

Changing the definition of fish habitats and completely rewriting the environmental assessment act? Oh, it’s a minor budgetary measure.

The cost estimates for planes we don’t need were lowballed by $10 billion? Oh, it was just an accounting error.

This government’s arrogance demeans the intelligence of its fellow parliamentarians and of Canadians as a whole. I’m not of the opinion that Stephen Harper has a secret Reaganesque agenda that he will suddenly impose upon the Canadian people. The government’s decisions are made hastily, without proper debate or analysis. The fact that it hides so much of its policy from the rigour of public scrutiny speaks to a sense of entitlement beyond comprehension.

There are a lot of things about the Conservative government that make me bristle. But what really made me taste venom today was the excerpt in today’s National Post from Noah Richler’s new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About War. He lays bare the plight of our injured military personnel, who get kicked to the curb if they’re no longer fit to serve.

If they die, they are hailed as heroes with a ramp ceremony and all. If they lose a leg, suffer PTSD, or commit suicide, the government quietly ignores them while scaling back supports.

Nothing is so callous as ordering young men and women to fight for a perceived sense of national security, then punishing them for not being quite dead.

But for a website that I spend so much time on, boy is it ugly.

Reddit Enhancement Suite is a popular browser add-on that offers fine-grained customization of your reddit experience. But my problem was the opposite. I didn’t want more knobs and twiddly bits – I wanted to get to the content as quickly as possible, and make posts and comments easy to read and navigate.

I didn’t want to get caught up in the karma game. I didn’t care about custom banners or flair. I wanted to read, respond, and vote with as few distractions as possible.

So I made a CSS theme for reddit that strips out the extraneous details, makes content king, and facilitates reading. If you’re a redditor, please do install it and let me know what you think in the comments. These are a few of the key features:

• The header area sticks to the top of the page as you scroll, so you have easy access to all your subreddits and your inbox
• Vote counts are hidden – the post’s position on the page is a good enough indicator of its popularity
• The content area is narrower, so you don’t have lines that stretch across the entire screen
• The softer colour scheme is easier on your eyes

P.S.: Two other browser add-ons have significantly added to my pleasure of using reddit: Hover Zoom and Reddit Hover Text. I suggest you install them if you browse reddit at all; it cuts down significantly ont he amount of clicking you have to do.

tl;dr: I made a minimalist reddit theme. Download it here.

More than the joy of reading, I felt good walking into the library and choosing the book in the first place. I belong here. I have a library card, I’m part of the club.

Being part of the club is important when you’re lonely. We’re all lonely in a way, but the feeling intensifies when you live by yourself.

For all the downsides to having roommates – labeling your food, coordinating shower times, splitting the utility bills – there’s still that tenuous bond that comes with cohabitation.

I’ve tried to fill that lack of community in different ways. Playing at open mics and hanging about in a few of my favourite coffeeshops helps to quell the loneliness for a time. Sometimes I’ll get cabin fever and spring from my desk chair as if from live coals, and head over to Baltimore House for a pot of Earl Grey tea with that slice of lemon they put in it.

Other times I’ll go for a walk in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, just to stir my sense of adventure. There’s nothing like curiosity to stave off the dull insanity of being alone. I breathe the unfamiliar sent of someone’s cedar hedge and fantasize that I’ve lived here all my life, pretending that that whiff of fresh greenery holds childhood memories.

The greatest distraction from my solitude is food. There’s always a new cafe to check out, always a new corner store to get that same old late-night junk food. But the black licorice, bags of jujubes, and chocolate-covered almonds can only do so much for me.

I find I impulse-shop a lot more when I’m living on my own. A picture frame here, some exotic spices for an unusual recipe there, maybe a book or a dvd that I don’t really need. It’s certainly an appreciable difference from my spending habits when I’m living with friends.

Is it callous to attempt to quantify this? If I added up all my excess expenditures, would I be able to measure the value of companionship? I’ll leave that question hanging for now, because I can’t bear to find out how much I’m missing.

So, if you’re in the Waterloo area this Friday night be sure to come out to St. Paul’s and enjoy the festivities!

This year is especially special, because the event turns 40! Word on the street is that one of the performers from the original 1972 show will be playing his set list from back then – phenomenal! Bring your daisy chains, people.

Details:
Friday, March 2, 2012
St. Paul’s University College
190 Westmount Road North
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G5

Admission at the door ($5-10 I assume?)

There’s something liberating about paring life down to the essentials, shunning extraneous material goods, and taking pleasure in the simple life. Of course, the Waterloo co-op schedule makes it difficult to accumulate too much because I know I’m going to have to move all my stuff out of my place every four months.

Digital decluttering, though, is a whole different animal. There’s a similar satisfaction of accomplishment when I delete old random files on my computer, or purge my Facebook friends list. Tonight, I decided to go a bit further and deactivate my accounts on a bunch of websites that I’ve decided I can live without. Posterous, Bitly, Reddit Radio, Kobo, Stock.Xchng, Last.fm, Songkick… it’s quite a tedious job to log in, seek out the account settings page, and possibly go through the help documentation to find out how to sever ties with the website in question.

It was through this process that I realised a hidden benefit to alternate login options like Facebook Connect. Logging in to third-party websites through Facebook or Twitter makes it a lot easier to close one’s account – it’s a simple matter of going into my preferences and revoking the third-party access.

I had always avoided using Facebook Connect because I felt that I had more control and freedom by signing up to each website individually. The flipside of that is an intensely tedious process when I want to delete my accounts. It’s a trade-off, but Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon so I think I’ll know how I’m going to approach Facebook Connect in the future.

Traffic, weather, stock markets, gas prices, the value of the Canadian Dollar… Traditional broadcast media bombards us with real-time updates about these indicators throughout the day.

Because we’re told about every dip and surge in the stock market, our society pays attention. We watch the markets and ascribe value to them, not least because they affect many of our bank accounts.

Knowledge is power, and the more information we have access to, the better off we will be. Up-to-the-minute traffic updates on the radio can help us adapt to unexpected delays and find a quicker route home. This is a good thing.

But there are huge gaps in access to real-time information. There are other factors that impact our day-to-day lives more directly than the TSX, but are hardly reported at all.

Imagine the evening news reporter saying something like this: “Strong winds across the province today caused a spike in wind energy, pushing the share of turbine-powered electricity over 10 percent. The surge allowed coal-fired and natural gas plants to wind down, resulting in a 2-point drop in the air quality index.”

This isn’t just speculation. The real-time information for these measures exists, somewhere. The challenge is to liberate it and make it accessible to the average citizen.

So that’s what I’ve begun to do.

I’m developing a website that shows, at a glance, how our society is doing right now in areas such as electricity generation, air quality, and crime. (I mean actual measurements of criminal activity, not just lopsided reporting of the most sensational cases.)

My goal is to have these indicators of social well-being reported on CBC Radio with the same frequency as the traffic and weather updates.

The website probably won’t be ready for a public unveiling until the spring, but I want to start getting other people involved sooner.

So this is where you come in. What else do you want to see reported on the news? Rates of charitable giving? Organic food production? Deaths by automobile accident? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll try my best to hound them down.

Another defect in the traditional consultation process is that it doesn’t feel very “real”. I mean, proposals come in on maps and diagrams and 45-degree aerial renderings, but when you actually walk over to the proposed site, it’s tough to visualize what the development will look like in that real, 3-D space.

The rise of Google Sketchup has solved some of these problems, but I’ve lot a low-tech idea that just might help.

Say there’s a missing tooth in the urban fabric that a developer wants to fill in with an 8-storey condo building. What better way to visualize the impact it will have on the neighbourhood than going over to the site and being able to actually see what it would look like? What if you could give feedback, right there on the spot, instead of relying on an abstraction in your mind to decide if you like the proposal or not?

So here’s what I propose. Take a viewfinder and clamp it onto a telephone pole (or a stop sign, or whatever’s there, as long as it’s in a fixed position). On the viewfinder’s lens is a rendering of the building. When you look through, you see the real streetscape – not a blocky, pastel-tinted Sketchup version of reality. You see the proposed building, as if it’s already been built.

Perhaps you’d be able to flick through a few different variations, like one of those old Kodak View-Masters that I played with as a kid.

And why not have a comment box there so people can leave their feedback? If anything, it would give people a reason to stop and mingle in the street.

What do you think? Is this idea a step forward in public consultation or am I just wearing sepia-coloured glasses?

Right now I’ve got two hours until my plane leaves from Pearson, so I have some time to kill and I’m thinking about how airports function as public spaces. More importantly, I’m thinking about how they can be better cultural standard-bearers and more welcoming places.

I said airports are a gateway to the unknown, but most of them are, in fact, depressingly predictable. Whether you find yourself in Karachi, Geneva, or Newark, you can be sure to find duty-free alcohol, book and magazine stores, jewelry, cologne, and tacky souvenirs. In other words, you can buy stuff you probably don’t need at prices you probably can’t afford.

If you’re lucky there might be some artwork up on the walls (and Pearson’s Terminal 1 has a beautiful echo chamber art installation), but it is rarely the focal point. It seems that public art in airports is mostly used to fill in the uncomfortable gaps between Starbucks and the duty-free shop. They are not attractions – a distraction, more like, from the steel-blue uniformity of the departure lounge.

Airport departure lounges are the perfect places for public amenities. I’m talking about museums, indoor gardens, recreation facilities. Flight delayed? Why not shoot some hoops to pass the time? Or why not have a proper museum with some Group of Seven paintings where I can get lost for half an hour? Because right now, my main options are either to buy some cheap rum or overpriced coffee, and neither looks very appealing.

If we transformed our airports into more than just malls, maybe travellers would feel like more than just cattle.

With Imprint taking a break until the new year, I thought now would be a good time to take a look back over what I’ve written in the past year outside of this blog. It’s been a tumultuous time on the world stage, not to mention two elections and some major policy debates at home.

Without further ado, here’s a list of all the articles I wrote this year. I’m looking forward, anxiously, to what 2012 will bring.

20 May - Apathetic students or a pathetic system?

It is a common tautology that students, and young people in general, don’t participate in the political system because we’re apathetic about politics. This reasoning, as convenient and ubiquitous as it may be, is false.

3 June - Realizing the Tunisian dream

Tunisia is in a state of flux. Ben Ali is gone. Elections are approaching. A bright future is on the horizon. And we’re in this in-between place where Tunisians are taking an active role in shaping the kind of country they want to live in.

17 June - A new deal for first nations

The Auditor General’s report makes it clear that the centralized programs of the past decade haven’t done much and are certainly not the way forward. To be frank, what the government can offer is money.

26 June - Make no little plans

We need an unorthodox alternative to the current Senate system that involves more than just scrapping the institution completely. If it’s regional equality we need, Harper and his reformists are thinking too small. If we’re going to reform the Senate, let’s do something wild. Something so crazy, it just might work.

30 June - Let the games begin

Now that the NDP — a party with significant ideological differences from the Conservatives — is the official opposition, we can expect more standoffs like this in the years to come.

3 July – The political schizophrenia of the Melancthon mega-quarry

Ontario doesn’t put an additional tax on aggregate, as some jurisdictions do, which makes sprawling subdivisions more lucrative for developers than inner-city redevelopment or infill projects. This project goes against the very kind of compact, vibrant cities that Ontario says it wants to have.

15 July - Has climate change become taboo?

Shh — don’t mention the elephant in the room. Perhaps it’s better that way. More comfortable, I suppose. If we don’t use the c-word, it’s easy to portray the icebergs as rogue wonders of nature, imposing themselves for a moment upon civilization. The reality, of course, is 200 years in the making.

17 July - Why let a good election go to waste?

It’s a disturbing trend to see the pre-election jostling play out more like an elaborate game of Risk than a real political contest. The focus is not political; it’s territorial.

19 July - Improving healthcare doesn’t have to be so difficult

Our dead-last rankings on timeliness and quality of care are certainly cause for concern. And the current C. Difficile outbreaks illustrate the need for a new model of healthcare in this country.

29 July - Campus politics revisited

Academic institutions have a reputation in modern history as hotbeds for political change. The best example is probably the May 1968 protests in France. Similarly, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood emerged out of universities in the 1970s to become a dominant political force. The list goes on. In Canada, however, the reverse seems to be happening.

6 September - What does Ontario’s election mean for our cities?

The most important issues in this election will be about more than education, healthcare, and HST. Many of the public services that Ontarians use every day are provided by municipal governments. So what will this election mean for Ontario’s cities?

12 September - Jack’s dream lives on

Jack Layton’s legacy isn’t wholly his own — nobody’s ever is. He was continuing the work that a great leader before him had started, and Layton was proud to carry on that tradition. And now he has passed the torch once again. This end is only somebody else’s beginning.

20 September – Towards an effective environmental lobby

It’s one thing to piss off the government, but when mainstream media won’t get onside either, the party’s over. At this point we’re left with a few fringe media organizations lauding the CYCC in a show of self-congratulatory hyperbole. This gives the government more reason to write off the hoax as hippie angst, not worth addressing seriously.

20 September - Vote with your heart and avoid a one-night stand at the ballot box

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—election season! Yes folks, once again, your candidates (the provincial ones this time) are knocking on doors and burning up photocopiers all over town just to get your attention. Doesn’t it feel nice?

22 September - Tough on crime? Not by a long shot

At the end of the day, this new crime legislation doesn’t mean much for the federal government—all the real work is outsourced to the provinces. Maybe that’s why Harper seems so happy about it. If crime continues its declining trend, he can take credit for the success. If judicial efficiency doesn’t improve, he can blame the provincial leaders.

30 September - We need a new way of doing politics

Much of my political activism has centred around the process of voting. I’m more comfortable encouraging people to vote and advocating for electoral reform than I am talking about actual policy. But for this election, I feel the need to highlight one K-W candidate who isn’t afraid to speak his mind, and whose vision for our community is frank, honest, and achievable.

11 October - Breaking the glass ceiling in Alberta

Kevin Libin zeroes in on the preferential voting system that the party uses to elect its leaders, throwing suspicion on the process as if it were a black box full of voodoo. In reality, this system injects a measure of proportionality that made Alison Redford’s victory more legitimate.

14 October - Sixth Decade Plan: what about us?

Political leadership is about having a vision for how a community should evolve. But the administration seems to have made up its mind about what direction to take, so it’s worth asking, why is it feigning interest in what students have to say?

21 October - Punch-card politics in the digital age

In politics it’s far too easy to criticize policies that I don’t agree with. So when I see something worth congratulating, I make a point of saying something about it. My friends, it is with great excitement that I present to you the Senate of Canada’s Twitter account — in both official languages.

28 October - Occupy all streets: part one

I knew of Anonymous’s amoebic leadership structure, its non-centralized, non-hierarchical decision-making. And on Sep. 17, I watched that system in action for the first time.

4 November - Occupy all streets: part two

So, where do we go from here? If the Occupy movement is going to continue gaining momentum, protesters in individual cities will have to coalesce around specific demands.

11 November - Eurozone solutions should come from the people

Put simply, the European Union is united no more. Where there are unifying forces, they are spurred by fear, uncertainty, and preservation of self-interest.

18 November - Why the cold feet on Syria, Conservatives?

As the international community moves swiftly to rein in Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the Government of Canada is dragging its heels on the issue.

25 November - Stimulus funding won’t save student life

The stimulus programs, responsible for so much of the construction on campus in the last few years, focused largely on academic and administrative space, ignoring the other infrastructure necessary for student life - study space, lounges, performance venues, and all the other things that connect students to their campus on a social level.

2 December - Our visceral civic duty

Since last May’s election, the political dynamics have changed, and those of us on the left are struggling to keep wind in our sails. The opposition parties cannot band together to block legislation anymore, but that doesn’t mean the wheels of democracy stop turning.