Monthly Archives: November 2017

Nov 28 2017
Leave a comment
Culture, Society

Ignorance on the rise

Posters and flyers in Moncton recently depicted two women in politics as tethered to the whims of men. This is, of course, absurd in a putatively enlightened and generally progressive society.

Still, stupidity appears to be on the rise in this democracy of ours. What did the late, great Prime Minister of England, Winston Churchill once say, presciently? “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe,” he once reflected. “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Naturally, no one is perfect, least of all those who, last week, deposited handmade paper missives against New Brunswick Finance Minister Cathy Rogers and Liberal candidate for Moncton Northwest, Courtney Pringle-Carver. According to a report by Brunswick News Inc., “The message carried by hundreds of posters strewn about Moncton, insinuating two female provincial politicians are controlled by their male colleagues is insulting, says one of the victims of the caricature.”

To be clear, the report continues, the caricature displayed both women under the direct sway of the political boys of summer. All of which is broadly offensive and lamentably emblematic of an uptick in harsh and ill-informed speech. Is this the way we are suddenly leaning in this province?

Let us hope we are not. But, I fear, we might be turning that way. After all, we can’t seem to resist the western world’s latent lust for demagoguery, intolerance, outrage and sheer imbecility.

The evidence of a new enlightenment is sketchy.

Trumpism south of the border has galvanized, if not created, a seething disbelief in everything that is empirically provable. Consider these excerpts from a report a year ago by Canada’s public: “A study co-authored by University of Montreal researchers suggests that while 79 per cent of Canadians do not doubt the reality of climate change, 39 per cent don’t believe it is caused by human activity. . . Survey respondents seemed to be deeply divided on what is causing climate change. For example, only 33 per cent of people living in the Fort-McMurray – Cold-Lake riding in Alberta believe climate change is partly or mostly caused by humans. That compares to 78 per cent in the Quebec riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie, where the rate is the highest.”

Meanwhile, another study conducted by the Ontario Science Centre over the summer concludes, and I quote, “Nearly half of Canadians believe science is a matter of opinion”. Specifically, “Canadians are hungry to learn about new science but their trust in science news has declined to alarming levels. . .While Canadians understand the basics and have a desire to deepen their knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes, their mistrust in the way science is covered in the news has serious implications for society.

“This breakdown in trust has serious consequences for Canada because our future health, prosperity and security all depend on making important, sometimes difficult, decisions based on scientific findings,” said Dr. Maurice Bitran, CEO and Chief Science Officer, Ontario Science Centre. “If we don’t trust the sources, or don’t understand the information we are receiving, we can’t make informed decisions. The findings of this 2017 survey demonstrate a vital role for authentic scientific voices in public education on critical issues that affect public policy and human health and wellbeing.”

Good luck with that. Stupidity and intolerance tends to stick like fly paper, even here, even now.

Tagged , ,
Nov 27 2017
Leave a comment
Business, Economy, Government

HAL, are you out there?

To read press releases issued recently by federal and provincial government operatives, Atlantic Canada is poised to become the next North American hotbed of ‘artificial intelligence’. But does the reality live up to the billing?

The answer is as complex as a coding exercise. The phrases that come to mind are ‘maybe’, ‘not yet’ and, quite possibly, ‘no’. That’s a subtle ternary calculation that only human brains can, thus far, fathom (some more effectively than others, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s morning tweets on just about anything and everything).

Still, according to a recent piece in the Memorial University Gazette of St. John’s, NF/LA, Ottawa and that province’s investments will enable the institution “to undertake a three-year research initiative focused on. . .systems (which) teaches AI systems how to make decisions based on past experience and deep neural networks focused on learning about large data sets by creating AI based on the human brain.”

Added Dr. David Churchill, assistant professor in the department of computer science at Memorial: “Artificial intelligence at its core is about developing computer technologies that make intelligent decisions – to help us solve problems not only in academia, but in many industrial sectors as well. AI is predicted to become one of the largest economic sectors in the world, and I believe that establishing a state-of-the-art AI research lab at Memorial University will help promote innovation, motivate future students, and have long-term benefits for our province.”
That’s fair enough. I’m all for the type of innovation that will wean this region from the debilitating and downward spiral of our expectations. At the same time, though, the thoughfully sceptical among us must recognize that artificial intelligence is a denominator, not a numerator. And if you, dear reader, do not understand my point, then you have made mine.

The bottom number in a fraction (the denominator) will grow as AI technology receives increasingly more money). The top number (the numenator) must increase in tandem to extract maximum economic benefits from the largest number of people possible (experts who will apply their skills in this region to solve, in their own ways, innovation gaps, economic adversity and, ultimately, social dislocation).

Look at it this way: For every ten dollars invested in any form of AI innovation, you will need an equivalent number of professionals operating at top efficiency to produce one new job. In that event, what’s to stop the companies involved from moving to places where they might get 20 dollars of investment to produce two new jobs? Does this feel like a good deal?

Beyond economics, though, does AI acutally live up to its hype?

A wonderfully written piece, by Ian Bogost, in The Atlantic last March makes the following points:

“In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans’ relationship to conscious machines. Whether it’s Terminators or Cylons or servants like the ‘Star Trek’ computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient – or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise.

“What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? Autonomous vehicles, for example. . .deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving. But in most cases, the systems making claims to artificial intelligence aren’t sentient, self-aware, volitional, or even surprising. They’re just software.”

That’s right. And we are the wetware that created them. The question is only whether we remain the truly intelligent ones in our midst.

Tagged
Nov 19 2017
Leave a comment
Government, Idiocracy

What New Brunswick needs now

As the sun swims down below the horizon faster as every day passes, the temptation is to believe that so do we all. Perhaps, that’s a natural, if not entirely reasonable, conclusion.

Time passes, the foundations of our youthful ambitions crack, we swell in the middle of our lives (and, by the way, in our midriffs), our tongues lash when our ears should listen.

In late August, New Yorker Editor David Remnick, ruminated on U.S. President Donald Trump’s absurd rise to power: He wrote:

“(The) ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the ‘food-stamp President.’ In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a ‘liberal fascist,’ who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. ‘You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,’ Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.

“And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. ‘We’ve seen this coming,’ he said. ‘Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.’”

Do we all become what we fear and loathe, regardless of our various demographic and geographic locations? Do we all sink below the horizons of our better, finer natures?

In this era of political insanity, what New Brunswick needs is clarity, policy innovation that actually leads to practicable solutions and, above all, sanity.

Specifically, it needs early childhood education that’s universal, accessible to all, and publically funded. It needs remedial literacy programs designed to reverse the pernicious trends, which threaten the foundation of education in this province, and the underpinnings of informed, democratic consent. It needs immigration settlement services that will truly integrate newcomers linguistically and culturally without compromising their personal and national stories of origin.

What we don’t need are more roads that lead to absurd amounts of public debt. What we don’t need are more state-of-the-art schools that run next to empty simply because the population base has dwindled or aged into extinction. What we don’t need is venality and absurdity masquerading as justifiable policy making in government.

The project is both simple and complicated (which human endeavour is anything but?). It starts with political transparency and accountability. It moves to social equity and ends with economic diversity. What are required are the voices, the ideas, and a fulsome degree of respect for one another.

Two years ago, the national, public broadcaster’s Julie Ireton reported, “Canada’s Public Policy Forum published a report authored by a group of business executives and former political leaders from across the country. Kevin Lynch, a former Clerk of the Privy Council and one of the report’s authors, agreed the public service must be allowed to provide analytic-based policy options.”

New Brunswick is a jewel of a province. Let us polish it before the sun also sets on us.

Tagged ,
Nov 18 2017
1 Comment
Personal History

A writer’s life

What I do is a little like skateboarding on thin ice, a cup of strong tea in one hand and a print-out of the local headlines in the other, searching for speed without managing to fall on my ass in the process. Some days it works; other days it doesn’t. Last Friday was the other day.

Out of the blue, and without warning, the news dropped: The Moncton Times & Transcript would no longer require my five-times-a-week column (occasionally six-times-a week), which I have been producing since 2010.

Oh well, I thought, this is merely the writer’s life: easy come, easy go. On the other hand, in this business, in this era, you had better grow a hide as thick as a rhinoceros’s. Otherwise, to paraphrase the late, great Warren Zevon, “They’ll rip your lungs out, Jim.”

From what I was told in a two-minute conversation, the decision had nothing to do with the quality of my work but rather an ephemeral policy shift governing the direction of the Op-Ed pages. And, to be fair, I did resign some months ago, expecting to move back to Halifax and be closer to my parents and kids, before being persuaded to hang in for the foreseeable future.

The future has changed, but the past is written. So, before I go, I’ll take this one, last opportunity to regale readers with some of my pithier comments this column supported over the past year

On New Brunswick politics, I wrote: “Every morning at about 5:30, after I awake and dress for the day, I embrace the singular displeasure of feeding an aromatic breakfast to ‘Sid the kid’. No, he’s not a hockey star from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, but in Moncton he moves like one. In fact, he’s a five-year-old house cat who can, and does, fly up vertical inclines as if he’s a dragon fly. He’s also a marvellous arbiter of important news during my morning coffee.

“Whenever New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant hits the early radio news, he rolls over and wants a belly rub. Whenever Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest spout from Ottawa arrives as the sun slowly rises, he arches his back, begging for a good, hard cuddle. Whenever, Donald Trump tweets the latest outrage from the fringes of American democracy, he runs to the barn, not to be seen until noontime.”

On New Brunswick economics, I wrote: “Be honest. Who doesn’t love a good acronym these days? Why, a whole generation of kids lives for them. They message them, tweet them and even pepper their casual conversations in coffee shops with them. Even POTUS (that would be ‘President of the United States’) prefers this short hand of the modern age over, say, actual sentences.

“Who am I to buck the trend? As the subject of what to do about New Brunswick’s anemic economy comes around, as it so often does, I will posit an acronym of my own. Call it HOT, which stands for Hope, Opportunity and Technology. Maybe this will grab some attention.”

On the general condition of Canadian democracy, I wrote: “Official pronouncements from the parliaments and assemblies of Canadian democracy have a tendency to send me into a deep sleep. I slept extraordinarily well last night. Then, I heard this from federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau in his well-timed fiscal update: We’re doing great; the country is going gangbusters; there’s nothing to see; move along people; go about your business.”

See you, dear readers, in some other version of the ‘funny papers’. This is Alec Bruce, still skateboarding on thin ice.

Tagged
Nov 18 2017
Leave a comment
Media, Personal History

The way things were

I spent my formative, misspent years in the scribbling racket grabbing coffee and cigarettes at 2 a.m. for an unruly crew of Canadian Press editors and rewriters ensconced at the old Roy Building in downtown Halifax.

I was what people once knew in that industry as a “copy boy”. I was 15 and right off the boat – literally. Prior to earning this august position, I had spent two weeks on a tall ship enroute from Halifax to New York just in time for the 1976 American bicentennial. I spent many days and nights clamouring up masts, rigging sails and booms and doing my level best to stay out of Davy Jones’s locker. As I was a small, nimble shite of a boy, I managed to save my own life several times in 30-foot seas.

In other words, it was good training for the rough and tumble of print journalism in the mid-1970s, when everyone in this industry seemed to think he was one acrobatic leap away from becoming another Woodward, another Bernstein, between cigarettes, coffee and hurricanes of bad breath.

Following my extended university career during which I majored in beer and minored in billiards, I managed to land myself a job at the Globe in Mail in Toronto. I was, to say the least, a fraud. I knew nothing abut the stock markets to which I was hastily assigned to cover. Banks, monetary and fiscal policy? Fuggetaboutit! Somehow, I survived.

They say the traditional newspaper is dead, and ‘they’ may be right.

As Paul Starr wrote almost 10 years ago, when the first clarion sounded, “We take newspapers for granted. They have been so integral a part of daily life in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and profitable in they’re own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical invention they are. Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good – and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.”

He continued: “Even before the recession hit, the newspaper industry was facing a mortal threat from the rise of the Internet, falling circulation and advertising revenue, and a long-term decline in readership, as the habit of buying a daily paper dwindled from one generation to the next. The recession has intensified these difficulties.”
Now, almost a decade later, the recession is over, the Bank of Canada assures that the economy is going gang-busters, and I still remember my ink-stained friends from my misspent youth: Dan Westell, who literally taught me everything I know about financial journalism; John Wishart, who taught me the value of grace under fire; and now that fine boy Rod Allen, who retired from the Moncton Times & Transcript at the close of business, October 31.

Wise, witty, acerbic, funny and a superbly talented scribbler, Rod has been a great friend to my good self over the years. He is also the best headline writer I have ever known (and believe me, I have known many).

It’s sad to see the finest moving along. But we’re no longer “copy boys”. New lives beckon. Grab them all.

Nov 18 2017
Leave a comment
Economy, Education

Invest in kids, period

Sometimes, I feel as if I’m banging the drum slowly. What better use of public money is there than spending bucks on early childhood education? After all, the evidence is plastered on the faces of every citizen in this democracy of ours.

New Brunswick is doing its level best to reconcile education with cost. Still, policy makers here have not yet recognized that the price drops later when the investment arrives earlier.

Here’s what a recent Conference Board of Canada report says, according to the nation’s public broadcaster:

“Canada is lagging the world in spending on early childhood education – and it’s going to cost the economy in the long run, a new report from the Conference Board of Canada suggests.

“In a paper published (late last month), the think-tank argues that for every dollar spent on early childhood education programs, the economy gets about $6 worth of economic benefits down the line. Not only do such programs give kids a head start, but they free up parents to work and increase the family’s income, too. ‘The science is unquestioning,’ said Craig Alexander, the group’s chief economist and one of the authors of the report. ‘There’s clear evidence that kids develop better and stronger essential skills,’ he said, ‘and we can basically show that this does act to reduce income inequality.’”

Empathy, that linchpin of the bonds that keep society from running off the rails, has taken a beating over the past few years. One needn’t spend much time scrutinizing the headlines for evidence of spreading spiritual unease.

We saw it in the financial meltdown of 2008, and in the subsequent, public-sector fiscal crises that afflicted the world’s leading economies. We saw it in cutbacks to social services and poverty reduction programs. We saw it in our communities, on our streets and, perhaps, even in ourselves.

“What, Me Care? Young Are Less Empathetic,” blared a headline in Scientific American in 2011. “Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate,” the article began. “A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years. The research found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.”

Does this sound oddly familiar at this time in the recent history of western civilization?

“The ability to see the world through the eyes of others is an economic imperative,” Todd Hirsch, a Calgary economist wrote in the Globe and Mail two summers ago. “If empathy were given the attention it deserves, companies would find new ways to please their customers. Innovators would dream up systems that save time and money. Conflicts would be resolved more easily. And maybe – just maybe – engineers would design products that are simple to use.”

But if empathy is such an important social, economic and technological enabler in productive adults, it is a quality that’s best and most easily acquired early in life, when the mind is young and supple.

In fact, one of the tenets of comprehensive, play-oriented early childhood education is teaching empathy to preschoolers: Putting oneself in another person’s shoes; coping with strong emotions; understanding and respecting different points of view, needs and desires. All are essential lessons to learn in a safe, positive, nurturing environment.

We become what we learn in this province. Let’s make that lesson endure.

Nov 18 2017
Leave a comment
Government, Politics

Use it or lose it

How do I love thee, federal government? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my bank account can reach, when feeling out of sight for years on end. I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet infrastructure announcement, by sun and candlelight.

My apologies to the late Elizabeth Barrett Browning for butchering one of her finer sonnets, but expediency sometimes trumps good taste (Hey, see what I did there? The words “trump” and “good taste” floated in the same sentence?)

But I digress.

Whenever Ottawa grants money for big builds in Atlantic Canada (and elsewhere in this country), provinces and municipalities are expected to pick up the slack, regardless of their respective economic circumstances. That’s the reality of a three-tiered system of government. Is this fair? Is it even sensible? Does it matter? It’s simply a fact of living and working in what the United Nations terms as one of the top ten jurisdictions on Earth for that ineffable, yet desirable, designation: Best Place Ever!

Now, we learn that New Brunswick simply hasn’t spent enough money in the federal tax pouch. In fact, this province is $30 million shy of its target, and if we don’t use it pronto, we’ll lose it. Or so says a piece this week in the Telegraph-Journal:

“The Gallant government says there is ‘absolutely no risk’ that (the federal money) earmarked for New Brunswick will go unspent before a looming deadline. . .A recent report showing spending from Infrastructure Canada says the federal government has given provinces an territories an ultimatum: Identify projects or all the money left from a 2014 infrastructure program or watch it go elsewhere.”

How delicious and how exquisite this is. We all pay into the Canada Revenue Agency and assume that our contributions will not only compensate national MPs and their senatorial counterparts for their sometimes bullish and oftentimes somnambulant protestations, but also ourselves – in our publicly assented pension plans, in reasonable management of our funds, in sense and sensibility from our public servants.

Yet, there remains this from a Government of Canada website:

“The Gas Tax Fund provides municipalities with a permanent, predictable and indexed source of long-term funding, enabling construction and rehabilitation of core public infrastructure. It offers local communities the flexibility to make strategic investments across 18 different project categories, including roads and bridges, public transit, drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, and recreational facilities. The fund promotes investments in increased productivity and economic growth, a clean environment, and strong cities and communities. The Gas Tax Fund started in 2005-2006 and is ongoing.”

Then there’s this: The Municipal Asset Management Program (MAMP) delivered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) is a five year, $50 million program that will help Canadian municipalities make informed infrastructure investment decisions based on sound asset management practices. The MAMP was launched in February 2017 and is scheduled to end in 2021-2022.”

And this: “The Municipalities for Climate Innovation Program delivered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) is a five-year, $75 million program that provides funding, training and resources to help Canadian municipalities adapt to the impacts of climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The MCIP was launched in February 2017 and is scheduled to end in 2021-2022.”

Use or lose?

To butcher, again, the prose of the great poet Browning, I will quote: “With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

Tagged ,
Nov 18 2017
Leave a comment
Government

N.B.’s property tax vernacular

What the heck does the word “pictometry” mean? Apparently, it denotes one reason why New Brunswick’s property tax assessments this year were an utter fiasco. After all, when you find human eyes simply blind to good sense, transparency and accountability, look no further than the bafflegab of techno-speak, courtesy of our various levels of government.

To be clear, pictometry means this: “It is the name of a patented aerial image capture process that produces imagery showing the fronts and sides of buildings and locations on the ground. Images are captured by low-flying airplanes, depicting up to 12 oblique perspectives (shot from a 40 degree angle) as well asan orthogonal (overhead) view of every location flown. These perspectives can then be stitched together to create composite aerial maps that seamlessly span many miles of terrain. Because they are taken from an angle, the pixels associated with pictometry images are trapezoidal, rather than rectangular. This necessitates special software and algorithms to accurately determine objects’ size and position on the maps.”

That’s from Wikipedia. And what I have to say about this is “Oh grand”. Send in the drones. It’s not as if we suffer enough intrusion of our private lives. Can one of these low-flying planes hover and land, pick up my grandkids’ toys, rake my leaves, paint my house before the snow flies? Yes, yes, can it also hang around and shovel my driveway?

Strangely, pictometry spectacularly failed the Gallant government this year. Said a report by the public broadcaster last week: “An internal Service New Brunswick document obtained by CBC News shows senior civil servants who were asked to explain what went wrong with a new property assessment system this year put Premier Brian Gallant at the ‘genesis of a decision to fast track the project. The document, obtained by a right to information request, was drafted in early April for a Service New Brunswick board of directors meeting and was released to CBC News late last month.”

Oh yes, this report goes on as you might expect: “The paper, titled ‘Fast track project Genesis moments’ claims the decision to abandon a multi-year implementation plan for a new property assessment system in favour of quick deployment was initiated on the afternoon of May 6, 2016, the same day Gallant was shown the new technology, known as pictometry.

“The term, fast track, was born following a pictometry presentation to the Premier during the Open House at the new created Digital Lab,” reads the briefing paper prepared for the board. “In the afternoon, the CEO of the time requested to accelerate this initiative.”

Again, “Gallant has denied any role in pushing for the accelerated adoption of the troubled new assessment system and on Tuesday his office questioned the accuracy of the newly released document, saying the premier and Gordon Gilman, the CEO of Service New Brunswick at the time, had no discussions with each other at all that day.”

Here’s what pictomtery means to me: surveillance, stupidity and incoherence. It also means incredibly bad English, diversion and a young premier’s hope that his vision weighs more heavily on the current generation than it does on history. Pictometry? Here’s the scoop: Pictometry technology was created and is owned by Pictometry International Corporation, which licenses the technology to companies across the globe. It is protected under US law, including Patent Ser. No. 60,425,275, filed Nov. 8, 2002.

Good to know. That still doesn’t explain why human eyes were blind to their evident failings, to their own hubris, to their own faith in words that make no sense.

Tagged
%d bloggers like this: