Yellowknife mayor Gordon Van Tighem set to retire following current term

Via Scoop.it – NWT News

Yellowknife, N.W.T. Yellowknife mayor Gordon Van Tighem made his annual address to the business community on Tuesday at the Yellowknife Inn, but this year, he threw a bit of a curveball. [excerpt] Van Tighem announced that he’ll be retiring as mayor at the end of his fourth term in October. He said it’s come to a point where it’s time for him to move on, as there are numerous worthy candidates to replace him. “I feel, really, that the city and administration, council has gone through and evolutionary process. There are other energetic and enthusiastic people out there, some on council some possibly from the community, as I was when I came in.” […]
Via hqyellowknife.com

Yellowknife’s Alison Mccreesh Takes a Trip

Via Scoop.it – NWT News

Alison Mccreesh Takes a Trip Posted on January 27, 2012 Over Christmas, Alison took a trip over the pond and wandered around the English countryside, Barcelona and Morocco. Here is her travel journal – in several installments (just keep on scrolling down).
Via alisonmccreesh.com

Freedom of expression concerns over Twitter’s country-specific censorship ability prompt users to call for #TwitterBlackout and #TwitterCensored protest

Via Scoop.it – MediaMentor
[excerpt] In a bid to “enter countries that may have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” Twitter announced that it has the ability to begin censoring tweets on a country-by-country basis, the Associated Press (AP) reported Thursday, Jan. 26. The announcement has prompted fears that Twitter’s commitment to free expression might be taking a back seat to profitability — especially in light of the role Twitter played in the Arab spring and protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States. Ironically, Twitter’s announcement comes just a year after the Jan. 25, 2011, start of the Egyptian revolution, during which more than 3 million related tweets were sent, prompting a report from the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam to declare that during the Arab spring, “social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom,” according to the Huffington Post. Despite a year ago arguing that “the tweets must flow” and declaring that “we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content,” Twitter now says it has “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.” Doing so is necessary, the company contends, because “as we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” and Twitter must uphold local laws. NPR questioned whether the potential censorship is a result of Twitter’s desire to begin operating in China, where in 2010 Google, which had been censoring results in order to operate in the country, announced that it would stop censorship after a falling out with the Chinese government, explained the Wall Street Journal. With hashtags like #TwitterBlackout and #TwitterCensored, users have started a campaign to protest Twitter’s new policy, calling for no one to use the micro-blogging site on Saturday, reported the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. [see original story for embeded links]
Via knightcenter.utexas.edu

Why 3-D Printing Isn’t Like Virtual Reality – Technology Review

Via Scoop.it – MediaMentor

The Miehle P.P. & Mfg. Co. 1905 printing press. Credit: Public Domain / Wikipedia.   Before you dismiss it as a fad, consider the evolution of 2-D printing. I’d like to sneak up on the question of 3-D printing by way of boring old 2-D printing. Typography used to be heavy industry. The companies that make typefaces are still called foundries because there was a time when letters were made of metal. When you got enough of them together to reliably set a whole book or whatever, you had a serious amount of hardware on your hands. Fonts were forged. Picking a new one was a large capital investment. Today, fonts are a thing that you pick from a drop-down menu and printers are things in your home that can render just about any typeface you can imagine. We went from massive metal fonts and centralized presses to the current desktop regime by degrees. In the early days of desktop printing, we had the dot-matrix. The deal was simple: “We give you one crappy font and you need specialized paper but you can do this at home”. It wasn’t useful for much, but it was useful for some things, and used frequently enough that it was worth developing improvements. Today, it’s reasonable for most people to have a pile of paper and a printer that cost them next to nothing and for businesses to have stockrooms laden with the raw material of documents. Print shops have had to stay a step ahead, selling convenience, their ability to print nicer things on bigger formats, or the economics of scale. I want you to bear this in mind, when you consider Chris Mims’ argument that the idea that 3-D printing will be a mature technology “on any reasonable time scale” is absurd. Chris is right that 3-D printing as it stands isn’t a replacement for the contemporary industrial supply chain. It’s clearly a transitional technology. The materials suck. The resolution is terrible. The objects are fragile. You can’t recycle the stuff. Maybe early home 3-D printers use only plastic and can only make objects that fall within certain performance restrictions. Maybe it starts out as, like, jewelry, the latest model toys, and parts for Jay Leno’s car. But there’s no way that lasts. People are already working on the problem. They are working especially hard on the materials problem. At the same time, it’s not hard to imagine a convergence from the other direction. Some materials and formats will fall out of favor because they are hard to make rapidly. Think of how most documents are 8.5×11 (or A4) these days. It’s just not worth the hassle of wrangling dozens of paper formats. It’s also important not to confuse 3-D printing & desktop-class fabrication. These aren’t the same thing. There is more to desktop manufacturing than 3-D printers. A well-appointed contemporary maker workshop has working CNC mills, lathes, and laser cutters. A well-appointed design studio has the tools to make and finish prototypes that look very nice indeed. Aside from the 3-D printer, none of these tools are terribly science-fictional; they’re well-established technologies that happen to be getting cheaper from year to year. Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working. There comes a point where making new things isn’t a capital investment but simply a marginal one. Fab shops are already popping up, just like print shops did.
Via www.technologyreview.com

Pine Grossbeak Feeding | Flickr : partage de photos !

Via Scoop.it – NWT News

I was very happy to see a pair of these beautiful birds at my feeder this morning… my computer desk looks out over the porch and I quickly got my camera that is always next to me. By Bruce McKay Yellow Snow Photography Bruce McKay
Via www.flickr.com

The 2012 Great Northern Canada Writing Contest

Annelies Pool [anneliespool@me.com] on behalf of Great Northern Canada Writing Contest has requested distribution of the following call for submissions:

The 2012 Great Northern Canada Writing Contest
Deadline – April 30, 2012

To enter, submit a piece of prose, either fiction or non-fiction, of up to 1,000 words about life in the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut or Nunavik. Previously published items are not eligible.

Entries should be typed and double-spaced with the title, but not your name, on each numbered page. Please submit a separate cover sheet with your name, address, phone number, email address, word count and whether your piece is fiction or non-fiction.

Entries must be mailed to:

Great Northern Canada Writing Contest
Box 1256,
Yellowknife NT
X1A 2N9

We do not accept emailed or faxed entries.

Deadline is April 30, 2012. That means they must be postmarked by that date.

First Prize is $500 and publication in above&beyond, Canada’s Arctic Journal.
http://www.arcticjournal.ca/

Special Emerging Writer Prize of $250 and publication in above&beyond, Canada’s Arctic Journal, for writers who have never been published for payment. To qualify, identify yourself  “emerging writer” on the cover sheet you submit with your entry.

Winners will be announced at the 5th Annual NorthWords Writers Festival in Yellowknife, NWT on May 31 – June 3, 2012.

The following are not eligible: Staff and contractors of above&beyond magazine and their families, writers who have been published in above&beyond in the last five years, organizers and paid staff of the NorthWords Writers Festival and their families.

#Apple’s cash balance is now a quarter of its $415 billion market capitalization and roughly equals California’s 2012-2013 state budget

Via Scoop.it – MediaMentor

[excerpt] (Reuters) – Apple CEO Tim Cook has a problem, a $98 billion problem. Just 18 months ago, Apple’s $46 billion mountain of cash – while huge by most standards – attracted only muted complaints from investors, who did call for a dividend or share buyback, but were mostly happy with the meteoric rise in the stock price. But with the growing cash balance now a much bigger overhang on the stock, widely considered to be undervalued, investors are clamoring more vocally for Cook to put the money to work. No one could have foreseen just how quickly that warchest would grow. Indeed, some analysts estimated Apple’s cash holdings would increase to $65 billion at the end of 201l. That it has swelled nearly 50 percent above even those lofty projections is nothing short of awesome. Apple now has about $104 in cash per share. But to paraphrase rapper P. Diddy, with more money comes more problems. Apple’s runaway success presents Cook with his first real public test as chief executive officer – figuring out what to do with the money. Apple’s cash balance is now a quarter of its $415 billion market capitalization and roughly equals California’s 2012-2013 state budget. And even though $64 billion of Apple’s cash is overseas – meaning it will have to pay a hefty tax to bring it into the United States – calls for a dividend on Wall Street grew louder after the company said on Tuesday it was in “active discussions” internally on what to do with the money. […]
Via www.reuters.com

Canada’s Arctic past -The Romance of the Far Fur Country – CBC News video report

Via Scoop.it – NWT News
Almost a century after it was shot, a long lost film of Canada’s Arctic had its first showing in Edmonton this weekend   It was shown in Edmonton Saturday afternoon. In 1919, the Hudson’s Bay Company commissioned a silent film documentary on the far north called The Romance of the Far Fur Country as it ramped up for its 250th year celebration in
Via www.cbc.ca

MLA Daryl Dolynny’s first lesson in Territorial politics? Former premier denies making Aurora World promises

Via Scoop.it – NWT News

[excerpt] Former N.W.T. premier Joe Handley says he never told the business partners at Aurora World they would not have to repay any of the money loaned to them. Handley also said he had no involvement in the 2004 restructuring of the failing aurora viewing business. “First of all, I’m not the minister. I wasn’t the minister at the time, and it doesn’t make any sense for a government to say, ‘give us a personal guarantee but you don’t have to live by it.’ That’s a stretch,” said Handley. The partners include Daryl Dolynny, the member of the legislative assembly for Range Lake. They took over the troubled business in 2004 after a restructuring which involved forgiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to taxpayers. […] [Interesting how we always hear Daryl Dolynny’s name mentioned in these stories, but never see to get told who the other “Aurora World partners” are? gl]
Via www.cbc.ca

Updated Evaporating Water in -30C in Yellowknife, NWT (March 13, 2011)

Via Scoop.it – NWT News

We discover that Samantha is really a witch! What other explanation is there?
Via www.youtube.com