Anyways, these are all on the blues rock spectrum and every one supremely awesome. These are five songs I just never get tired of.

Enjoy!

• Midnight in Harlem by The Tedeschi Trucks Band. This is absolutely my favourite song from the last few years. We saw TTB last summer at the Toronto Jazz Festival and they were amazing. This version is pretty representative of the live versions on YouTube. I’ve highlighted Derek Trucks a bunch of times. The song first appeared on the Revelator album and there’s also a great live version on Everybody’s Talkin’.
• Goin’ Down South by RL Burnside. This is the live version from the Burnside on Burnside. This is simply one of the most intense live blues recordings ever. A must-listen.
• Tell the Truth by Eric Clapton. This version of the old Derek & the Dominoes song is from the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010. Doyle Bramhall II and Derek Trucks also contribute.
• How Blue Can You Get by BB King. Simply my favourite blues song by my all time favourite blues performer.
• Road Runner by Bo Diddley. This is a live version that was used in a car commercial a year or two ago, but it’s a great one nevertheless.

And don’t be shy. Add some links to songs you really love.

So who said that?

Sadly, it was the John McDougall, President of the National Research Council of Canada talking about the restructuring and refocusing of the NRC.

Here’s some more from the Sun News article:

The government of Canada believes there is a place for curiosity-driven, fundamental scientific research, but the National Research Council is not that place.

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,” John McDougall, president of the NRC, said in announcing the shift in the NRC’s research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems “commercially viable”.

Science Minister Gary Goodyear said: “There is only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge … second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit. Unfortunately, all too often the knowledge gained is opportunity lost.”

*snip*

Citing the NRC’s “inability to respond to industry’s demands,” Goodyear explained that the NRC will now respond exclusively to industry’s demands.

“We want business-driven, industry-relevant research and development.”

The article also includes a quote from David Robinson of The Canadian Association of University Teachers:

“Discovery comes from what scientists think is important, not what industry thinks is important,” he said. “Fundamental scientific advancement drives innovation, and that is driven by basic research.”

And from the CBC story,

Council president John McDougall said the NRC will become a more attractive partner for business.

“We have shifted the primary focus of our work at NRC from the traditional emphasis of basic research and discovery science in favour of a more targeted approach to research and development,” McDougall said.

“Impact is the essence of innovation. A new idea or discovery may in fact be interesting, but it doesn’t qualify as innovation until it’s been developed into something that has commercial or societal value.”

It’s a matter of going for concrete results, he added. “We will measure our success by the success of our clients.”

*snip*

“By helping Canadian businesses develop and bring technically advanced products to market, the NRC is supporting the creation not only of jobs, but good-quality, high-paying, long-lasting jobs,” he said.

“We will continue to support basic research, but the use of that knowledge is the next step,” he said.

The day is past when a researcher could hit a home run simply by publishing a paper on some new discovery, Goodyear said.

“The home run is when somebody utilizes the knowledge that was discovered for social or economic gain.”

Industry should fund industrially-relevant research and development, not governments. Or at least not as the sole research that governments fund. Of course, Canadian companies are notoriously stingy on R&D so it’s hard to know why the government would want to save them even more on their R&D budgets.

It’s important to hit home runs, that’s for sure. But there are different kinds of home runs: inside the park, solo, two run, three run, grand slam. And a triple followed by a sacrifice fly or a double followed by a single both also score a run just the same as a solo home run and can just as easily win the game. In just the same way, we shouldn’t get too tied to one kind of research or one model for research funding. Putting all your eggs in one short term basket and hoping it works out is just the same as stacking your lineup with big swingers who aim for the fences all the time but also strike out a lot.

=================

Here are some of my recent posts about the Harper government’s war on information in general and science in particular:

• Reading Diary: Keystone XL: Down the Line by Steven Mufson
• The Canadian war on public science, basic research and the free and open exchange of scientific information
• The Canadian War on Science: Ottawa’s dangerous unscientific revolution
• Around the Web: The Canadian War on Library and Archives Canada
• An Open Letter to the World on the Governmental Destruction of the Environment in Canada
• Controversy at the recent Canadian Library Association conference
• York University Faculty Association (YUFA) Library Chapter letters to Minister James Moore in protest of the cuts to Library and Archives Canada
• The Canadian War on Science: Stop muzzling Canadian scientists!
• The Canadian War on Science: Environmental rules should be better, not easier
• The Canadian War on Science: Environmental rules should be better, not easier
• The Canadian War on …
• Whither CISTI and the Canadian War on Science
• NRC-CISTI’s announces new public-private partnership with Infotrieve
• Q&A with NRC-CISTI about their new public-private partnership with Infotrieve
• Is Barak Obama good news for science in Canada?

Here’s the info:

Science and the New Media Ecosystem

Bora Zivkovic, Blog Editor at Scientific American

Monday, May 6, 2013, 2:00 – 3:30 pm
Paul Delaney Gallery, Room 320, Bethune College
York University, Toronto
Map

Abstract:
The whole media landscape is shifting and changing – newspapers on the decline with blogs, Twitter and YouTube on the rise.

Science is no different. Come listen to one of the pioneers of online science communication talk about how this new media landscape is shaping how science is done, evaluated and communicated in an increasingly connected world.

If you can’t make the talk, there will be also be a ScienceOnline Toronto Tweetup at The Duke of York that evening starting at 7pm. Sign up at the Facebook page or just show up!

The talk is open to the public. If you’d like to attend but aren’t sure about the logistics of getting to York, campus maps and directions are here. Subway construction has made getting to campus a bit complicated, so be aware of the various transit options on the map/directions page.

You can also just email me at jdupuis at yorku dot ca.

The kind of place that closes world-class research facilities in the arctic and in lake country. (Thanks, Ontario!)

The kind of place where the government actively muzzles it’s own scientists and librarians, the scientists for wanting to share their research and librarians who want to talk about the importance of preserving our heritage, scientific and cultural.

The kind of place where Environment Canada would take their own name off their weather service website. Really? Yeah, really.

The kind of place where the Federal Government slashes its own role in environmental reviews and downloads it onto the provinces.

And perhaps most significantly, it’s become a place where the Minister of Natural Resources attacks respected climate scientists over their scientific views on the Keystone XL project (Apologies!).

Even when they set up an open data portal for oil sands information, it’s hard for anyone to believe they aren’t just greenwashing.

And that’s why this whole Keystone XL pipeline debate in the US is so interesting to us Canadians. Our government is for it, but their record on anything even vaguely concerned with the environment is so abysmal that it’s hard not to automatically oppose anything they support. They fact that south of the border, it’s the cause of so much controversy and political and social wrangling seems almost quaint and irrelevant. We almost want to shout out, “No, you fools, don’t do this! Can’t you see it’s a bad idea!”

I realize that there’s lots of people against the project in the States: the EPA says it’s a bad idea, Canadians are telling you the same story in your media, so are regular folk, environmental think tanks and fellow ScienceBloggers in a bunch of different places.

But there’s a lot of support too, from industry shills, of course, but also quite a bit of political support on the Republican side. President Obama seems cautiously positive but undecided.

And that’s sort of why I approach this new TED book, Keystone XL: Down the Line by Steven Mufson (Amazon Kindle), with some trepidation.

But I needn’t have worried. Like the last TED book I reviewed, this one is actually pretty good. The premise is fairly standard: the author and his merry band of journalists go on a road trip from one geographic end of the Keystone XL story to the other. In other words, from Alberta to the US Gulf Coast. Along the way, they meet both ordinary folk and a few oddballs whose lives are bound by the future of the XL project. They also meet a bunch of oil biz big wigs who have huge stakes in what happens. Sprinkled in among all the local and international colour are in depth discussions of the history of the Keystone XL project in particular and the oil sands in general. The social, economic and environmental implications and controversies are also dealt with in quite a bit of detail, in a fairly standard more-or-less objective journalistic manner. Mufson doesn’t explicitly take a stand on whether or not the pipeline should be built and he very clearly understands that you can’t look at this one very specific issue out of the context of the worldwide supply and demand for energy. North Americans use an awful lot of oil and it has to come from somewhere.

Of course, at the end of the day the climate science isn’t much in doubt, and the controversies are more manufactured than genuine. And this comes through very clearly. This is no climate denialist or industry apologist tract.

Overall, this is a solid, detailed exploration of the nature of the Keystone XL projects and the various issues surrounding it; there’s enough colour and narrative to keep the info dumps and wonkish policy explanations moving. If you don’t know much about the issue, there are worse ways to get up to speed. It’s well worth what TED is charging.

What do I wish were a bit different?

First of all, the Canadian part of the road trip could have been a bit more central to the narrative, perhaps it could have started in the south and headed north. The intermixing of details and narrative also made both a bit fractured, something that would have been fixed by having a detailed chronology somewhere as part of the document. And speaking of the document, certainly this sort of ebook lends itself very easily to detailed citations of all the various facts and figures sprinkled throughout such a book. I really missed a bibliography. In particular, a book on such a contentious topic needs to show sources even more than most books. And I guess that’s the key — the TED Books need to feel more like books than extended newspaper pieces.

My final complaint is that the roadtrip/interviews/profiles/infodump template for this sort of story seems a bit too timeworn. The ebook format seems to present some possibilities to explore new ways to tell these sorts of stories and TED should be the place to explore those new ways.

But to end on a high note, here’s a quote from the author giving a good sense of what the book is about and why it is such a solid read. It is from a recent interview on the TED site:

You say the pipeline is a Rorschach test of how Americans view energy issues. Can you elaborate?

For four decades, we have thought about oil as a scarce resource. We imported more and more at higher and higher prices and went to distant frontiers, whether onshore or offshore, to find oil and gas. The sheer scale of the oil sands in Alberta has been Exhibit A of those extremes. The Saudi oil minister has often said that prices had to stay above $60 a barrel to keep the Canadian oil sands economically viable. All of a sudden, the trends reversed and a slew of oil prospectors – like the North Dakota fracking pioneer Harold Hamm who is profiled in the book – and energy experts are talking about U.S. energy abundance. Imports have dropped nearly in half. U.S. oil output has climbed over 7 million barrels a day and the International Energy Agency has forecast that U.S. output will surpass Saudi Arabia’s by the mid-2020s. Canadian oil sands would compete for U.S. refinery space with Venezuela, and North Dakota, Louisiana and Texas shale oil has enabled the big refiner Valero to stop importing light, sweet crude oil.

It’s partly a matter of interpretation and partly a matter of outlook. There are the folks who worry about climate and make calculations about booming demand across the developing world. And then there are the optimists and industry people who see more opportunity – which in the case of prospectors and drillers translates into profitable opportunities.

So which is it? Are we energy rich or energy poor? The truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, the United States has surprising new resources at home, and U.S. consumption may have hit a plateau as fuel efficiency rises. This is a big benefit for the U.S. balance of trade and the domestic oil and gas industry. And while U.S. oil independence remains elusive, the Keystone XL pipeline would help make North American oil independence conceivable.

(Kindle version supplied by publisher. This version is missing all the audio/visual extras of the version sold through the TED Books app. But given my experience with the previous TED Book I reviewed, that’s probably not too significant a factor for reviewing purposes.)

Mufson, Steve. Keystone XL: Down the Line. New York: TED Conferences, 2013.

Here goes!

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin (reviewed by Dan Falk) (Amazon)

Considering the esoteric nature of some of the material being presented, Time Reborn is relatively jargon- and equation-free. There are some challenging concepts, but nothing to deter the lay reader. (Smolin has said that he’s also working on a more technical book on the same subject, to be co-written with philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger.)

I hope this is the start of an exciting new chapter in theoretical physics. But I fear that Einstein was right, and that the ultimate explanation for time’s apparent flow might come from the realm of psychology or neuroscience rather than physics. Science, after all, has a track record of overturning our “common sense” beliefs about the world. Again and again, things that were “obvious” – that the sun revolves around the earth; that humans are fundamentally different from other animals – have been shown to be artifacts of an anthropocentric worldview. Maybe the “obvious” passage of time is another of these illusions.

NOS4A2: A Novel by Joe Hill (Reviewed by Ilana Teitelbaum) (Amazon)

Hill is the son of Stephen King and, with this new novel, he emerges as a literary inheritor of his father. (Hill’s brother, Owen King, also recently released a new novel, Double Feature.) NOS4A2 contains familiar elements for Stephen King fans, such as the twisting of something beloved (in this case, Christmas) into something pathologically scary, and a maliciously sentient car. But despite its roots in traditional horror, this is a book about the dangers of idealizing innocence and traditional values, a message with clear political implications.

One of the standout qualities of Hill’s work is his ear for the rhythms of language, the creative metaphors that surprise and satisfy. His sentences crackle with wit and understated craftsmanship – the kind so skillful it is only visible if you’re paying attention. It is through language that Hill weaves the subtly disturbing atmosphere that permeates NOS4A2 even in its least threatening moments, such as in a description of a diner: “[She] didn’t like looking at the flypaper, at the insects that had been caught in it, to struggle and die while people shoved hamburgers into their mouths directly below.” Not long before, Hill describes the laughter of a group of girls as being “like hearing glass shatter.”

Consumed: Food for an Finite Planet by Sarah Elton (Reviewed by John Varty) (Amazon)

But I don’t think Elton’s all about casting off the “other side” with tidy dualisms. Indeed, she anticipates, even concedes, some of her critics’ main arguments. She’s aware that “conventional” agriculture tends to out-yield organic; she’s heard about studies challenging the energy efficiency of local food.

Trouble is, so many studies supporting industrial agriculture simply don’t provide a full-cost accounting. Yield, for instance, is clearly important; but preponderant evidence suggests that the total energy inputs of modern agriculture are not returned to us in calories. Not even close.

By necessity and circumstance, the items I’ve chosen will be influenced by my son’s choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media for outreach and professional development.

• 5 Steps to Separate Science from Hype, No PhD Required

• Why grad schools should require students to blog (advice applies to ugrad students too, but in a different way)
• Who will hire all the PhDs? Not Canada’s universities
• Pragmatic Advising (faculty members discussing how to advise their students on grad school)
• Math and Science Are Not Cleanly Separable
• On Talent in Sports and Science
• Why Do We Do Science?
• STEM and Liberal Arts: Frienemies of the State
• How to hire data scientists and get hired as one
• Stephen Hawking’s advice for twenty-first century grads: Embrace complexity
• Sleep in Graduate School (same advice mostly applies to ugrad too, or really just life.)
• Motivation and Student Success

The previous posts in this series are here, here and here.

Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

But in my defense I’ll maintain that I’m getting better as I get older — more tolerant and accepting and less snobby. Perhaps not coincidentally, I think my takes in reading material are getting more diverse too.

In any case, let’s all enjoy 30 things to tell a book snob.

1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will stop reading.

2. Snobbery leads to worse books. Pretentious writing and pretentious reading. Books as exclusive members clubs. Narrow genres. No inter-breeding. All that fascist nonsense that leads commercial writers to think it is okay to be lazy with words and for literary writers to think it is okay to be lazy with story.

3. If something is popular it can still be good. Just ask Shakespeare. Or the Beatles. Or peanut butter.

4. Get over the genre thing. The art world accepted that an artist could take from anywhere he or she wanted a long time ago. Roy Lichtenstein could turn comic strips into masterpieces back in 1961. Intelligence is not a question of subject but approach.

5. It is harder to be funny than to be serious. For instance, this is a serious sentence: ‘After dinner, Alistair roamed the formal garden behind this unfamiliar house, wishing he had never betrayed Lorelei’s trust.’ That took me eight seconds to write. And yet I’ve been trying to write a funny sentence for three hours now, and I’m getting hungry.

Go read all the rest of the suggestions. Then fire up your reading device and/or dig deep into your bookshelves and read any damn thing that gives you pleasure. (Me on Goodreads plus my 2012 reading.)

Now, at the end of the day, I tend to think music snobs are just as bad. It would be fun to see a
“30 things to tell a music snob” post somewhere. Of course, most of the points would be similar, but slightly different.

Maybe we can invent one in the comments?

I’ll start:

1. It doesn’t matter whether or not the musician is living or dead, young or old, it’s all just music. If you like it and it gives you pleasure, that’s all that matters.