Friday, August 20, 2010

I'm a Catalyst now...


I responded on a whim to an invitation from the Globe & Mail to be a member of their Globe "Catalysts" program. I was accepted to be one of 1000 out of 8000 applicants, to provide my personal insights and comments on current affairs and issues of interest to Canadians, via forums with other members and their journalists.

I was happy to be accepted, and even somewhat surprised, given that part of my application included a personal rant about their climate change front cover page from a couple of weeks ago. The headline was something along the lines of "any doubts around climate change have now been debunked". Their evidence was a dozen or so "graphs" containing various squiggly lines, most of them sweeping up to the right. The captions on the graphs had titles around temperature and other measures.

My rant, however, was that none of the graphs had any x or y axis! So there were no measurements of what I presume would be tempurature and timelines, for example. Any one of the graphs could have been the temperatures from yesterday, for example, or showing a range of .00001 to .00002 degrees. There was no way to tell, and this was covering their entire front page! Even less intellectually stimulating than an Al Gore documentary.Crazy!

The good thing I guess is that they accepted me into their forum anyway. I guess every group needs an agitator : )

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

We Day 2010

Congratulations to Lorne Segal and his team for producing a truly remarkable event to get young people engaged in their community! They're doing it again in Vancouver on October 15th and bringing in speakers including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Martin Sheen, Rick Hansen, and...well, Al Gore (you can't win them all)! I encourage those of you with teenagers to try and get them involved through their schools - check out www.weday.com.