Who buys books in Canada?

The Globe and Mail has a story, Book buying up 23 per cent, report says by Rebecca Caldwell (Sat. April 2, 2005, R7) on a new report by Hill Strategies Research called, Who Buys Books in Canada (March 2005) which shows that spending on books rose 23% between 1997 and 2001. What is interesting is the size of the print culture business. Spending on books is about the same as movie tickets and newspapers. If you add magazines, newspapers, and books you see that print media dominates over other media.
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Massive Change, the Show

We went to the Bruce Mau show on Massive Change: The Future of Global Design at the Art Gallery of Ontario. After being disspointed in the web site (see Massive Change and Overrated Sight) I was more favorably impressed by the show. The first thing my wife noticed standing in line was how young the people coming were – it seems to have reached a demographic that doesn’t come to galleries. The show itself is didactic – there is lots of text to read and to listen to and most of it is earnest in an improving way. What is impressive is how they have taken what is essentially an essay and turned it into an exhibit that seemed to work for the 20-something crowd. The points are illustrated and exhibited in interesting ways like the room of images showing the ways we visualize our world.
One side of me wished I could afford to turn a course into an exhibit like this. Imagine if you could exhibit a class and then assign the show as a field-trip alternative to the lecture. Hmmmm….
Another annoying feature of the show was that it treated everything as design. In many ways it was about politics and the environment. To think that design in anything other than the weak sense of creative solutions is the key is hubris. In a sense everthing human is designed, that is what we call intentional behavior aimed at a new outcome. In a stronger sense design is a subset of such practices and politicians are not designers.
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Old story on Silicon Knights

MacLeans has a story from June 11, 2001, titled “Gaming Knights; Canadian creator hope to score off Sony, Nintendo and Micrsoft” by Danylo Hawakeshka. It is on a game company, Silicon Knights, which is based in Saint Catherines, just down the road. Silicon Knights presents itself as organized around a “guild” philosophy which seems drawn from the gaming culture. This is from Kelly.
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Digital Divide: Definition and Dialogue

From Humanist, two interesting links on the “digital divide”. The first is a report from the Morino Institute, From Access to Outcomes: Digital Divide Report and Dialogue. The report has 10 sensible premises starting with the obvious, “Focus on narrowing social – not digital divides”.
The second is from an issue on “The Digital Divide” (Spring 2001, Vol. 1, No. 2) which has articles of interest on, TCLA:. The Digital Divide:. Politics & Education:. Framing the Digital Divide. In particular there is an article by Randall D. Pinkett, Redefining the Digital Divide.

Fallis: The Mission of the University

A column in today’s The Globe and Mail by John Fraser titled, “Universities need money, yes, but a social mission, too” (Saturday, March 26, 2005, Page F9) drew my attention to a longish submission to the Rae commission by George Fallis from York. Titled “The Mission of the University” this report is available on the COU Think Ontario ª Resources ª Documents page. The report is a good overview of the history of the university, the uses and expectations of the university leading into the current mission of the Canadian university.
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New Communications Blogzine

New Communications Blogzine is a blog structured like a newsletter that focuses on new forms of communication like podcasts and blogs. It is aimed at communications people in media and business. It is associated with “blog university” which is mounting New Communications Forum events. (You can see pictures from one in Europe posted to Flickr.
The blogzine has some good short stories about new developments.
This thanks to Terry Flynn.

Ritchie: Evolution of Unix Time-sharing system

gt.gifI’m reading around the history of programming in Go To and was intrigued by the connection between Unix and time-sharing.
This connection is made explicitly in the title of a paper by one of the developers of Unix, Dennis M. Ritchie,
The Evolution of Unix Time-sharing System (PDF). As an interesting aside, the key proposal by the development group that got them a PDP-11 to work on proposed to develop a text editing system and their system ended up supporting the word processing of the patent group. Unix and Electronic Textuality! I knew it.

In early 1970 we proposed acquisition of a PDP-11, which had just been introduced by Digital. In some sense, this proposal was merely the latest in the series of attempts that had been made throughout the preceding year. It differed in two important ways. First, the amount of money (about $65,000) was an order of magnitude less than what we had previously asked; second, the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified) operating system, but instead to create a system specifically designed for editing and formatting text, what might today be called a `word-processing system.’ The impetus for the proposal came mainly from J. F. Ossanna, who was then and until the end of his life interested in text processing.

For more on Ossanna and the history of troff see The GNU Troff Manual – 2 Introduction.
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