‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’ is a line from Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem, “An Essay on Criticism,” although I first heard it as a line in a Johnny Mercer song recorded by Frank Sinatra. Perhaps I risk identifying myself as a fool by discussing a topic likeRead More

In writing about the provincial government’s latest rural broadband promises last week, I cited the example of Yarmouth County’s Cedar Lake Wireless Cooperative. The group received a grant of $41,879 under the province’s Municipal and Community Rural High-Speed Internet Funding Program to bring high-speed internet service to the community and, to date, has connectedRead More

The government of Nova Scotia is going to make sure everyone in the province has access to broadband internet. I know what you’re thinking — don’t tell Motorola. They think they solved that problem for us back in 2010, those crazy kids. They even used as a “case study” inRead More

Sydney City Hall? I will be the first to admit the name “Cape Breton Regional Municipality” does not roll mellifluously off the tongue, nor is “CBRM” any prettier. I think it would be good to have an actual name for our municipality and I would like to be able toRead More

This is an embarrassing confession for a reporter to make but here goes: sometimes, when I read news stories, they just wash over me in a wave of acronyms and quotes and dollar figures, leaving me no better informed than I was before I began reading. This is rarely aRead More

(Wide) Open data I’m still trying to digest all I’ve read about the great hacking-that-wasn’t of Nova Scotia’s freedom-of-information portal. There is a lot to digest. The story has legs and has bounded all over the planet, a textbook case of — take your pick — lax data protection, policeRead More

In the last two columns, I have been exploring Cartesian dualism and some of its consequences. This month, I want to consider an intriguing technological development that may emerge out of the marriage of Cartesian thinking and advances in computer technology. This is the claim made by some so-called “immortalists”Read More

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of essays by Susan Dodd on Nova Scotia’s history of blaming coal mining accidents on the miners themselves — a history that finally changed in the wake of the Westray disaster. You can read second and third and fourth essays by clicking theRead More

It all started with a sentence in a story about one of the men charged in the Cape Breton Regional Police’s “John Be Gone” undercover sting operation. You remember John Be Gone — initiated after complaints from downtown Sydney businesses about sex workers on Charlotte Street, it saw two femaleRead More

On March 27, over 130 states will meet at UN headquarters in New York to commence negotiations, mandated by the General Assembly last December, on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. This country, alas (see my January column, ‘Divided Nations: Canada Ducks Disarmament Challenge’), will be joining most of its NATORead More