Uninhabited Spaces

A new StatsCan report has found that Kingston has the highest proportion of people with PhDs among the country's 27 largest urban areas. Viewed as essential to a knowledge-based economy, PhDs represent the engine of innovation. Interestingly, Kitchener-Waterloo--which trumpets itself as the country's Palo Alto--ranks 10th in this report. Clearly, Kingston needs to build on this strength and create (with its industrial and educational partners) a research and innovation park/campus that can truly incubate some thought-leaders.

I have gotten a few raised eyebrows when I have mentioned that the new "Battlestar Galactica" is among the very best shows out there. This reimagining of the campy 70s series debuted in 2003 as a miniseries, and was of such high quality that a series was inevitable. Let me state for the record that this program is shockingly good, raising the bar on how well written and acted a science fiction show can be. But don't just take my word--the New York Times , the New Yorker , and even the National Review have all given "Galactica" glowing reviews. Anchored by the excellent Edward James Olmos (yes, he from TV's Miami Vice ) and Mary McDonnell (two-time Academy Award nominee), the cast is simply outstanding. The series explores the relationship between a government and its military, and human values under the most adverse conditions, all amidst the clash between human and non-human sentient beings after our species is forced to flee from Earth after a massive att...

As we head into the frenzy of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, it would well-serve politicians and citizens on both sides of the border to read Michael Adams' Fire and Ice . Adams is the co-founder and president of polling company Environics, and his interests have evolved from subject-by-subject polling to macro-level social values polling. This book examined the U.S. and Canada along 100 social values points, and the results contradict commonly held assumptions about these two neighbours. I was in the last year of high school when the warning bells were struck over the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement (which later morphed into NAFTA), and how it would precipitate the decline of Canadian culture and values. The rhetoric spun on both sides of the debate here in Canada, from Mulroney's handlers to the Council of Canadians was particularly divisive. It appears the worry was not warranted. The differences among Canadian and American citizenry are rather striking. As Adams wri...

A new ranking just released by MoneySense ranks Kingston #6 overall for best place to live in Canada. While I am sure that the folks at KEDCO and DBIA will all clap themselves on the back, I worry that such a ranking will breed a dangerous complacency amongst the spin doctors and politicians. Kingston has some very real social justice problems, a worrisome unemployment rate, poor physical infrastructure, and an inadequate industrial tax base. I imagine this ranking reflects only those who fall around or above the reported average annual family income of $67,000, which is surely not a fair snapshot of the city's socio-economic reality. It would have been much more accurate to report the overall median Kingston household income, which the 2001 Canadian Census reveals was $58,413. That's a significant variance from the average! However, single-parent households (which the Census reports were 15% of Kingston's population in 2001) fared worse, with a median income of $29,872. S...

In her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood presents a dystopian world extrapolated from our current one. Transglobal biotech companies assume the dominant role of providing privileged humans with food and shelter in protected compounds. The disaffected are left to fend for themselves. There are rampant bioengineering projects, where humans are spliced with pigs and other animals are spliced together to create new species. In this environment, a scientist inadvertently creates a genetic pandemic that kills off the original human race (save for the novel's protagonist "Snowman") leaving only the genetically engineered "Crakers", an innocent, humanesque race without any knowledge of the prior reality. Atwood terms the novel as being "speculative fiction" rather than pure science fiction, as the possibilities are merely an extension of what she views as the logical progression of our current state of affairs. In this regard, Atwood is highly unroman...