Beset by bad news, Canada cheers up over Nobel

TORONTO (AP) — Alice Munro's Nobel Prize in literature is a morale boost for a country that has been generating an unusual run of bad headlines.

There's the lurid story of Toronto's mayor, allegedly caught on video smoking crack cocaine; a jaw-dropping tale of official corruption in local Quebec politics, and a runaway freight train loaded with oil that derailed and set off a fireball that killed 47 people and destroyed the center of a small Quebec town.

On the entertainment side there was an uproar over a maladroit reference by pop idol Justin Bieber to Anne Frank, while in the business world, Canadians are agonizing through the slow demise of their once golden child of technology, BlackBerry. 

Overall, Canadians have been feeling self-confident with their rising profile in sports and the arts, their growing oil might and their success in having weathered the global economic crisis.

Yet the bad-news stories seem to have come thicker and faster in the past year or so.

Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, said the flow of negative news got so bad that Al-Jazeera, the Middle Eastern TV network, interviewed him about it.

So he has extra reason to celebrate the 82-year-old Munro's Nobel triumph. "The scandals have blackened our eye to some degree but with this award, it reverberates on many levels; it's tooting Canada's horn," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. 

  Topping the list of ongoing sagas is that of Rob Ford, the bumbling, tough-talking mayor of the city that brands itself "Toronto, the good." The Toronto Star says two of its reporters watched a video that purports to show the 300-pound (135-kilogram) mayor sitting in a chair, inhaling from what appears to be a crack pipe.

The Star says it did not obtain the video or pay to watch it. The video hasn't been made public and The Associated Press hasn't seen it. Ford has said there is no video and has called the allegations ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Montreal has lost one mayor, Gerald Tremblay, amid corruption allegations, and then his temporary replacement, Michael Applebaum, was arrested on fraud charges linked to two real estate deals. Among the juicy details that emerged from the French-speaking province's scandals was a safe so jam-packed with cash that the official in charge of it needed help to shove its door shut.

"It's too depressing, and would make Mordecai Richler do backflips in his grave," journalist and social commentator Dalton Higgins said in an interview. Richler was one of Montreal's most celebrated novelists.

Of course, cautions George Stroumboulopoulos, a popular TV talk show host, "Every country in the world has positive and negative moments."

He noted in an interview that "we have the biggest pop star in the world (Bieber), one of the biggest rock bands in the world (Arcade Fire), we have a Nobel-winning author now, right? And those aren't the only ones in their genre. We have always punched above our weight in the arts and culture game. Just sometimes people don't pay attention."

In the arts and culture realm, "Canada's really come along and cut out a niche, it's come out of the shadow of its British colonial past," Wiseman said. "While we have had our share of dismal stories this year, a lot of people don't read politics but they read literature so these authors help shape their image of Canada and Munro's win has helped create a feel-good story."

And Canada is shining not just in the arts. With a touch of the-Empire-strikes-back, Mark Carney, former chief of Canada's central bank, this year became governor of the Bank of England — the first non-Briton to hold the post.

The feel-good factor in Munro's Nobel is heightened by her own modest, homespun manner. Told of the award, her reaction was: "At this moment I can't believe it. It's really very wonderful. I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win."

John Degen, the director of the Writers Union of Canada, called Munro's award "a bright spot" in an otherwise less than enjoyable year for Canada.

"It's a nice story and I'm glad that it happened to us," Degen said. "And just listen to how I'm talking about it. It didn't happen to Alice Munro, it happened to us! It happened to you and I. We claim it for our own and immediately, that's how proud we are!"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/beset-bad-news-canada-cheers-over-nobel-143142340.html
Category: elizabeth smart   sofia vergara   trent richardson   Antoinette Tuff   Maia Mitchell  

Computing Beyond the Turing-von Neumann Architecture | CCTP ...

Zach Schalk

This week’s readings and projects provided an interesting change of pace.  While touching on many abstract and theoretical concepts of computation, I felt like it was much easier to engage with and digest these topics without drowning in a new flood of vocabulary, metaphors and theories.  Also helpful is the fact that I’m currently working my way through my first ever programming class, Professor Evan Barba’s Tangible and Embodied Computing.  Let’s just say that the exasperated quotes from Princeton engineers working on the Maniac in Poundstone’s review of Turing’s Cathedral hit pretty close to home.

While I’m only a month into the course (I’ve also worked through some of the Codecademy course on javascript in the past, and now I’ve dipped my toe into Python as well), I feel like I’ve learned a great deal about computer programming (Lesson number one: sometimes the best course of action is to take a deep breath and step away from your program when you get stuck–the alternative might be a bit more destructive).  One thing we haven’t discussed in Professor Barba’s class, however, is computer architecture and the processes that allow our programs to work.  For that reason I was very interested in the readings seeking to illuminate these concepts, as well as the thinkers and engineers who brought them to life.  I had no idea that the basic architecture of the Turing-von Neumann model of computation remains at the foundation of most computing devices we interact with to this day–despite all the advances that have shaped the digital age in which we’ve grown up.  This startling (at least to me) fact is a true testament to the genius of modern computing’s forefathers such as Turing, von Neumann and Shannon.  It also begs the question of what, if anything, comes next.

I have long been interested in emerging computing technologies.  While I generally lack a rigorous understanding of these technologies beyond the explanations available in the popular press (trying to fix this was one of the reasons I first became interested in CCT!), a compelling case can be made that these emerging technologies have interesting and far-ranging implications for the manner in which humans will make use of computers in the future.  In his introduction to The Pattern on the Stone, Hillis makes a passing reference to a new conception of computer design and programming that breaks down the current reliance on top-down hierarchy and instead relies on an “evolutionary” model that builds on its own accumulation of processes.  He also mentions other experimental forms of computing such as quantum computers and those that attempt to more accurately mimic the neural pathways of the human brain.  These are very exciting concepts that, more than a decade after Hillis published his book, are finally starting to show up in the market.  Cognitive computing (as Prof. Irvine points out in his introduction to computation) made a splashy debut with IBM’s Watson–though that was just the first of IBM’s attempts.  Facebook recently created a new group working to apply the artificial intelligence concept of deep learning–simulating neural networks to process data–to their product in order to better manage the flood of unorganized data it collects daily, joining other tech giants such as Google and Microsoft in pushing the limits of machine learning.  And, to much fanfare, the Canadian company D-Wave has produced and sold the first commercially available quantum computers (though, as the linked article explains, there are many skeptics who believe the device is neither really quantum nor faster than a traditional machine).

What are the implications of these types of computational advances?  It depends on who you ask.  Can the advances in artificial neural networks help us link and organize the ever growing sea of unstructured data on computer networks, or find meaning in the ever increasing flow of data being collected by private companies and governments around the world?  Will quantum computers shatter our existing encryption paradigm with their ability to factor large numbers?  Will these new computers enable the creation of rich and immersive virtual worlds and new standards of human-computer interface?  Is the singularity near? Possibly most relevant for this class, might this new era of computational architecture allow the computer to grow into more than just a “remixing machine” of previous mediums and create something entirely new?  These are big and scary questions with implications that I can’t even imagine and I have no idea what the answers will be.  But, for me at least, it’s fun to ask.

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