Jonathan Brun

As you might have noticed, I am no fan of Harper. It’s not personal, I’m just not a fan of secrecy, manipulation and corrupt behaviour.

Today, a draft report from the Auditor General was leaked and it paints the Conservatives as band of crooks lining their friends’ pockets. Add onto that the statement by Montreal conservative candidate that conservative ridings get more money. And then, to add salt on an open wound, the Harper Conservatives used a quote that Sheila Fraser made in reference to the prior Liberal government of Canada and tried to attribute it to their G8/G20 summit (Source) (GC Parl Doc). I am not sure pathetic and amateurish cut it. This is just plain sleazy.

Don’t forget that this government was brought down on contempt of parliament, refused to hand over documents related to afghan detainee torture, fudged numbers on the F-35 fighter jets, and refused to break down the costs for their crime bill. Really Canada, would you tolerate this behaviour from your family or friends?

Elections are messy business, the truth an ever moving target. Spin, spin, spin. In 2008, Stephen Harper ran on a campaign of 5 promises. His tactic of focusing on only 5 items significantly helped him communicate his message to Canadian voters. With that in mind, I decided to choose 6 important facts about Stephen Harper’s prime ministership and display them on one page, to allow Canadians to make an educated decision on his qualities as Prime Minister of Canada. The facts we chose are:

1. Abuses Canada’s Parliament,
2. Foreign Policy Fail,
3. Wastes your Money,
4. Hides the Truth, and
5. No Regard for Science.

Well maybe more opinion than fact.

We made an effort to present these items in a tasteful and aesthetic manner, to encourage you to share the site. Far too many progressive sites veer off into crazy town; we wanted to avoid any such image. We are not endorsing any alternative party, we simply encourage you to consider Stephen Harper’s track record and what his re-election might mean for the future of Canada and your children.

The website is simply titled, Why Harper Sucks, or alternatively, Why Stephen Harper is a bad Prime Minister. Read the facts, get the talking points, and decide on your own. If you agree, please share the site with your friends and family.

As you might know, I am a huge TED fan. I have watched almost every single TED Talk, yes, every one. To be fair, I started watching as soon as it went online and have simply kept up since. So, it was a great challenge and a lot of fun to present at this year’s TEDx Concordia. I only found out about the event after it had been announced, so no 20 minute slots were left, but the amazing organizers were kind enough to give me 5 minutes on stage to present Montréal Ouvert and Open-Data for the city of Montreal. I hope you enjoy the talk and I look forward to being on the real TED stage one day!

Since I just wrote about my Boob Booth idea, i thought I would follow up with this interesting TED talk about breast tumours and better detection methods. Let’s just say it’s all about breast density.

Over 23 000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Canada every year. While the survival rate is fairly high (87%), much pain could be avoided with early detection. In my continuing quest to help woman (see makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com), I have devised a simple fundraising and educational device: a breast cancer sensing and awareness booth. Particpants attempt to detect tumors in artificial breasts.

The booth, shaped with female curves, will attract onlookers from far. Arriving at the booth, they step up to it and insert a dollar – like a vending machine. The slots protecting access to the sleeves open. The participant inserts their arms and feels two artificial breasts with a series of fake tumours in each breast. After usage, the participant must indicate the number of tumours in each breast. A paper receipt with the results, useful information on breast cancer, and ways to donate or help is then printed.

1. The participant would insert 1$ into the booth. (A)
2. This would open the slots (B)
3. The participant would insert hands and arms into the sleeves. (C)
4. The participant would feel the two fake breasts, each one with a different number of imitation cancerous tissues. (D)
5. Participant withdraws hands from sleeves.
6. Participant indicates how many cancerous tissues are in each breast. (E)
7. Answers are revealed and receipt with web address and reminders is printed. (F)
8. Shorter participants can use step (G) to place arms in sleeves.

Resources required:

• CAD drawing of device (which should be open-sourced)
• Artificial breasts with tumours
• Electronic Payment and receipt system

Me, presenting the idea!

Relationships are complicated. For one, they rely first and foremost on your understanding of yourself, your needs, priorities and desires. Second, they rely on your ability intimately understand another human being with equally complex emotions, history and feelings. If humanity were given a grade for its romantic relationships, we would fail. Over half of marriages end in divorce and the vast majority of less formal relationships don’t work. To paraphrase Anna Karenina, “Happy couples are all alike, each unhappy couple is unique”. With that in mind, it seems like a service which promotes the commonalities of happy couples might help pull us towards a passing grade.

For one reason or another, I have kept this little side project off my blog. But alas, it has engulfed much of my time and is now receiving thousands of visitors a day. As with all projects, the idea has been growing over time. The original idea was born out of a discussion with some friends in Paris and was centred around a reminder service and mailing list for men in relationships. The next addition to the site was a registry type service where women can indicate their sizes and preferred brands for shoes, clothes, jewelery and lingerie along with secret wishes. We have been adding videos, tips, and games to the site with some ambitious plans for the year ahead. With Valentine’s day in just a couple of days away, maybe take this opportunity to think about how you can make your girlfriend or wife happy. Visit Makeyourigirlfriendhappy.com to see what all the hubbub is about.

Feel free to send comments and suggestions to me jbrun@jonathanbrun.com or, cyrano@makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com.

We’re on twitter too, click here to follow us.

Heck, we’re even on Facebook too, click here for that!

And, here I am introducing the site!

Domain squatting is a major problem. Companies go around picking up every imaginable domain name in the hopes of reselling it or placing ads that generate revenue. This land grab slows growth and drives people and businesses towards less intuitive names. Many registrars allow you to grab a trial period for a domain before purchasing it further increasing the incentive to bulk grab names to test traffic before splurging the 5$ on the actual purchase. To solve this issue, we could raise the cost of domain registration and renewal and remove the trial period. Nothing exorbitant, perhaps 50$ or 100$ per domain – the revenue from the increased price could be donated to charitable causes, schools, hospitals or some other worthy cause. The effect would be increased revenues for our struggling public services and a reduction in domain name squatting.

In the states, they collect data on the racial make-up of the society and where they live. The image above is from the New York Times info-graphic based on US Census data, and each point represent 500 people. I am curious to know what you think of making this data available. My first question, is why don’t we collect this data in Canada?

Secondly, though I am a proponent that more information allows us to make better decisions, sometimes more information can hurt us or actually hurt a system. For example, to take a banal example, Facebook actively prohibits you from knowing who is looking at your profile. My guess is that they feel that were you to have this information, people’s relationships to each other would be negatively impacted – I tend to agree.

My question is, does making racial make-up publicly available (which is different from collecting it) help citizens. Or does, it further promote ghettoization of races into different neighbourhoods? I am not sure. Of course, immigrants naturally gravitate to specific neighbourhoods where they might have family and friends, but by making this information even more available, are we not encouraging this behaviour even more?

And, should we be making decisions based on race? Arguably, having this information allows the US to say “Blacks have less access to high quality schools” and therefore put in place programs, but should the question not be “People of a certain income distribution have less access to high quality schools”. What value is there in differentiating people by race? There are of course negatives – big ones.

While I realize that the data in the US is per 500 people, it still seems dangerous. Clearly identifying people or groups by race (or religion) can lead to very bad things. Whether it is Hutu/Tutsis or Muslim/Jewish or any other government-run categorization of people based on race or religion, there are downsides that potentially outweigh any upsides.

All in all, I think this is an interesting case of open-data and its merits. Should we collect this data? If so, should it be made public?

Here are 4 crazy ideas, let me know what you think.

Membership for restaurants

Restaurants have cash flow problems, patrons often hesitate to go out because of cost. How about a membership (or time-share) system for restaurants. You create a subscription for restaurants where you pay a monthly fee and get x number of meals (table d’hôte – fixed meny). This allows for restaurants to improve cash-flow and for patrons to go more often. There are supper clubs for hard-core foodies, bit this would be for the normal folk.

Justify

Government, like many large organizations, are wasteful. How about we create a website to list the budgets of different government institutions and ask people to vote if they think the budget is worth it. Each institution should have to justify itself in relation to its budget, purpose and impact. As anarchists say, we should constantly question why an institution with power exists and if it no longer lives up to its requests, the institution should be changed or scrapped. Right now, budgets are hard to visualize. Where and why tax payers money goes is a mystery to even the most hardened government official. With this website, the people coulees vote on whether or not they agree with the budget in proportion to the justification.

TED Talk of the Week

When TED started out, they put out 1-3 talks a week, now, there is close to 1 a day. Sadly, I am having a hard time keeping up. Concurrent to the increase in talks, there has been a decrease in consistency. You still have some amazing gems that rock your world, but many talks are now average. What if we set-up a very simple website that allowed people to vote on their favourite talk of the week and propose a winner. This would allow some filtering and perhaps make the real gems stand out.

Contests Aggregator

There is tons of free stuff out there to be had. Local papers often offer movie premiere tickets, raffles give away gift cards and other contests offer innumerable items. Many people, sometimes elderly, spend their time combing through the papers, applying and winning these items. How about we build a simple aggregator for contests for free trips, movie tickets and other items commonly offered by newspapers and promo companies are offered. The site would be membership based with a 15 day trial period.

Things change quickly. Prior to the 1960s, Quebec was run by Maurice Duplessis and the Catholic Church. Upon his death in 1960, a radical change in government took place as power over health care, education, and much of Quebec society, perviously held by the Catholic Church, was ripped away and given to a democratically elected government. This non-violent revolution took place in the span of one decade and lay the foundation for today’s society. Just as that revolution saw the power move from one shadow government, the Catholic Church, to a more representative government, today’s shift transfers power from the hidden parts of our government back to the people.

Western governments are crippled with debt, which simply means they are trying to do too much with too little. You can argue their management is inefficient, the systems are too old or they are not competent – either way, the people are tired of it and are demanding change. Citizens live in a connected, digitized world with email, Facebook, and other amazing tools. When citizens, especially young ones, arrive at a government website, a hospital or a public school, they fail to understand how they are run so inefficiently. Of course, these institutions have inherited decades of legacy technology and practices, but that is still not a satisfactory answer. The people have expectations and governments are failing to live up to them.

Three major pressures are coming down on governments around the wold – Citizen expectations, Open-Data and Wikileaks.

Citizen expectations are born out of their daily lives. They communicate through email, Facebook and Twitter, see photos and have access to amazing tools. They consequently expect governments to rapidly embrace these same tools to improve the standard of living and better deliver existing services. However, governments are often burdened with so much responsibility they cannot easily pivot and change according to new technology. It is thus important for governments to begin offering the raw data so that third parties – citizen’s, non-profits and business can help deliver services to society. This raw data feed is a new trend that is rapidly growing into the global Open-Data movement.

The Open-Data movement, of which I am part, requests that governments offer their information in a format that can be reused and turned into practical tools. Advocates of open-data want governments to open up their databases of information so that citizens can peer inside, see problems and help fix them. Citizens want governments to embrace crowd-sourcing, leverage experts in their communities and be more efficient. While many governments resist, we should remember the cries of outrage when parliament was first required to publish the Hansard, it is now consider obvious that parliament would act in a transparent manner for all citizens to see.

The third force acting on governments today is fear, fear of Wikileaks. Wikileaks illegally takes information from governments (and corporations) and exposes it for all the world to see. Even in democratic countries, governments have little experience with full and complete transparency. In many ways, the elected government is a superficial level of a shadow government which runs continuously through election cycles and whose power is out of sight of most citizens. It manages the society through meetings, diplomacy, statistics and more. In fact, Assange and Wikileaks want to pull the structure of secrecy out from underneath government bureaucracies. By removing the secrecy of their communication, Wikileaks forces them to either revert to secrecy, which slows down their operations, or open-up, which forces them to act in a moral and appropriate way. The best summary of Wikileaks’ motivation can be found here.

The traditional, semi-closed, hierarchical bureaucratic government institution has served well for over 40 years, but it is time to change. Citizen expectations, Open-Data and Wikileaks will change it by increasing transparency, efficiency and fundamentally making it more representative of the citizenship. Make no qualms about it, society is undergoing a revolution, but a quiet one. The power structure we have now will radically change as citizens and organizations push for honesty through transparency.