Montreal City Weblog: L’Autre Montréal, Heritage Montreal
Les visites guidées, c’est pas seulement pour les touristes…

Babies detect unfamiliar music rhythms easier than adults
Some potentially fascinating ideas from this research. Mentions of language acquisition and the notion, dear to culturalists throughout the history of anthropology, that enculturation is a selection process from a large set of possibles. The latter notion runs a little bit like the fact that infants are able to reproduce any speech sound at a certain point in their development but that they then learn to restrict their production to those sounds that are present in their native languages.
IMVHO, the type of research this item describes would be much more relevant to most music research than efforts to localize “music processing” in the brain.

Wired News: Move Over Pyramids, Wynn’s Here

‘We will keep getting bigger, keep getting bolder in Las Vegas,’ he says. ‘It’s what makes this city great, it’s why people want to come here.’

Only in Vegas.

Molson construira à Moncton l’une des brasseries les plus modernes au monde
En partie grâce à l’appui du provincial. Sachant que Pumphouse et Picaroons ont gagné des prix nationaux, qu’ils sont des représentants plus adéquats du monde brassicole néo-brunswickois et que leur financement est minime, pourquoi ne pas les soutenir plutôt qu’enrichir Molson et Moosehead?

Playlist: Fiona’s Extraordinary Machine, retail rebounds?

fans and interested parties were given perhaps the most famous album preview in the history of recorded music

Actually an interesting practice, even though industry executives weren’t “in on it,” More clueful than most current practices…

Drinking outside the box

“If nothing else convinced meof the counterproductive effects of American drinking laws on college life,” he writes in Binge, “my experience at McGill University in Montreal did.”

And McGill’s probably much closer to the US model in drinking than UQÀM and UdeM or even Concordia. At least, that’s the main impression you get from people.

Binge drinking is a huge problem at Indiana University Bloomington and the administration is applying even stricter rules, which is exactly the strategy to make it worse. Isn’t it ironic that Ruth Engs is over there at IUB?

Wired News: Whew! Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny
As is often the case, the article sounds overly confident as to the benefits of the research. On the face of it, it does sound like an interesting direction for research. It’d be nice to have a clear explanation of what the epigenome means for interactions between biology and environment, including social environment.
There certainly has been an overemphasis on genes as direct causes of anything, recently.

NPR defining new Podcast strategy

[Mis à jour mardi 16 août 2005 21:26:36 pour ajuster mon ton un péremptoire.]
Tristan Louis:

The second part here is that NPR is working on a downloadable and portable strategy, which goes against the core of Doug Kaye’s argument that public radio is doomed.

On n’a probablement pas compris le texte de Doug Kaye de la même façon. ÀMHA, ce sont deux choses assez distinctes. D’un côté, NPR est en train de trouver une façon d’embarquer sur la vague de la baladodiffusion. Intéressant, sans doute. Pas très nouveau. Les «médias de masse» qui parlent de baladodiffusion mentionnent souvent qu’ils se prennent au bon moment pour ne pas répéter l’erreur qu’ils ont commises à ne pas comprendre les blogues. Quoique, leur «longueur d’avance» dans le podcasting demande à être analysée finement. Mais cet effort n’altère aucun des arguments de Doug Kaye par rapport au modèle de radio communautaire qui, selon lui, va s’effacer par rapport à la baladodiffusion. Et Doug Kaye ne signe pas vraiment la condamnation des radios communautaires. Tout au plus, note-t-il le manque d’adéquation entre ce vieux modèle et une prise en main de nos médias.
Bien sûr, la radio communautaire risque d’exister encore longtemps. Mais elle ne peut pas rester inchangée.

[Geowanking] building social modelling tools
Ok, didn’t RTFA, just skimmed it. Quite elaborate for a mailing-list post and it’s harder to read off context. (Was mentioned by Tim O’Reilly.)

The thrust seemed to be to look at causalities between social processes and environmental factors, à la Jared Diamond (of GG&S fame).

As an aside, have been more of a Civilization player. Including the open-source Freeciv. Used some examples in class. Not because of the war aspect (always try to win with “culture” in Civ3). But because of the oversimplified social model. Should probably give SimCity a try at some point.
Not a big gamer altogether.

Macworld: News: US burger chain beefs up free Wi-Fi to 243 stores

When the Wi-Fi service was proposed, the company quickly chose to provide it for free, he said. “It’s so simple to provide free wireless, and it’s incredibly complicated to charge for it,” Reid said. “We looked at it and it was just a no-brainer. It’s like having a clean parking lot and clean bathrooms. It’s just another amenity for our customers.”

Good way to look at it!