This book has earned well deserved rave reviews in many US publications - Wired, the New York Times, and Smithsonian to name three. This week it has climbed quickly to the #2 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List, in the hardcover nonfiction category.

Doctors took Henrietta Lacks’ cells from her cancerous cervix without her knowledge. Her cells, known as HeLa, launched a multimillion-dollar medical revolution. Her cells were the first human cells grown in culture, and provided material for all kinds of studies such as cancer research and the effects of the polio vaccine and the atom bomb. The cells are still alive today, although Henrietta’s family did not learn of her immortality until more than 20 years after she died.

Award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot worked on this story for 10 years, turning down an early contract to stick to her vision, which included interviews with Henrietta’s family members. Skloot’s research is exceptionally comprehensive, providing breadth and historical context to the story. The story is fascinating yet horrifying, and serves as a comprehensive exploration of ethics, race, and legal issues surrounding scientific research.

I enjoyed the audiobook version but plan to buy a hard copy as well. Checking online, I find that hard copies are in Canadian stores now.

Today, Stéfan Danis is taking on the first stage of the Atacama Crossing, his second extreme desert race. A year ago, he placed exceptionally well in his first desert race, the Gobi March, finishing:

• 14th overall in a field of 130 competitors
• first in the men’s 40-49 age category
• first Canadian to cross the finish line

What’s amazing about Stéfan’s accomplishment in the Gobi March last year was that he had never even run a marathon before. The Gobi March is 250 km in total: racers complete a full marathon distance each day, except on day 5 they run a double. They carry all of their own food and supplies as they run in adverse conditions like scorching heat, uneven rocky terrain, salt flats and riverbeds. Stéfan achieved his excellent results last year in spite of training injuries, shin splints, swollen ankles and sheer exhaustion.

Why is he running? Stéfan is raising money for the National Advertising Benevolent Society (NABS), the only charity in Canada providing support to professionals in the communications industry.  Stéfan raised $41,000 for NABS last year with his Gobi challenge and hopes to raise more in this year’s race. Stéfan is CEO and Chief Talent Officer of Mandrake and NexCareer, Canadian firms which provide executive search and career counseling services.

RacingThePlanet decided to continue with this year’s race in light of the recent tragic earthquake in Chile. The race offers significant benefits to the communities that participate in the race execution. RacingThePlanet has also established a disaster relief effort together with Habitat for Humanity. Stéfan blogged that he plans to stay in Chile after the race to participate in the relief effort.

To see what the race is like, have a look at this video clip from day 5 of the 2009 Atacama Crossing. The racer at about 3:05 says it best,

“Try to always go forward no matter how slow it is.”

From February 1-5, 2010, Canadian journalist Janic Tremblay participated in an experiment called Behind Closed Doors on the Net. Five journalists stayed in a farmhouse in France for five days, cut off from mainstream media, only allowed to use Twitter and Facebook as sources of information.  Tremblay was further restricted in that he was not allowed to click on links to other sources.

In my previous post, I wrote that this experiment could only test the accuracy of each journalist’s contact list, not the utility of social media.

In his interview with BBC after the experiment, Tremblay concludes,

“you won’t know the truth from Twitter…it’s one source, a little bit of information.”

While I still take issue with the study design, this experiment did magnify both the power and the danger of relying only on social media for reliable news.

On the plus side, Tremblay was able to conduct an interview with a jailed Russian activist. The detainee was somehow still in possession of his smartphone and tweeted from a jail cell for three hours, even though he had no legal representation and not been informed about why he was being held. The power and immediacy of Twitter (and possession of a smartphone) made this interview possible.

In another example, Tremblay points out the danger of relying on a little information without verifying sources. An explosion was heard in a particular city and within minutes, people were tweeting about it, adding their own speculations about the cause. In a few hours, there was a Facebook page set up with 5000 members. But what really happened was that a plane had crossed the sound barrier, a much different truth than the wild hypotheses.

Twitter and Facebook are only tools for communicating. Journalists must verify sources and publish with integrity.

Lake Louise snowshoe tracks

Lake Louise is a haven for outdoor snow sports. Located in majestic and historic Banff National Park, the lake freezes solid in winter and makes the perfect setting for a snowshoe adventure.

Stop in at Wilson Mountain Sports in the village of Lake Louise to rent some top-notch snowshoes and poles for the low fee of $10 per day. We chose MSR Lightning Ascent shoes, lightweight technical gear with ascension levers, hinge steel crampons and speed hook lacing for easy entry without exposing your hands to the wind. There is a little grocery store in the same plaza where you can pick up water, snacks and lunch to pack for your trek.

Find parking at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise and it’s a short walk to the lake. Why do you need ascension levers for a flat frozen lake? At the end of the lake on the right side you will find peppermint blue Louise Falls, a local favourite frozen waterfall for ice climbing. To get a good look at the climbers, pop up your heel levers and climb up the steep hill to the bottom of the falls.

Louise Falls

Save some energy for the hike back: even with snowshoes we were sinking about 15 cm each step for 2 km both directions.

Cyclamen with macro lens

When winter is over, I’m looking forward to trying out my new macro lens. If this shot taken inside is any indication, there will be much to enjoy when gardening season is here.

From Feb. 1-5, five radio journalists will sequester themselves in a French farmhouse with only Twitter and Facebook for outside information. All other media such as radio, television, and mobile phones are banned. The objective is to test the legitimacy of news from Twitter and Facebook. The five radio journalists from Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland will each report on their respective radio stations. According to Press Gazette:

“The reporters from France Inter, France Info, RTS and RTBF radio will be allowed to click on links put up on Twitter and Facebook, with the exception of Janic Tremblay from Radio Canada, who will be attempting the experiment without ever leaving the two social media sites. France Info will be hosting five live debates on the issue every day throughout the course of the experiment.”

Mathew Ingram posted his thoughts on GigaOM.com. He says this project will only prove:

“that some journalists — and their masters (the experiment is being sponsored by the French public broadcasting association) — are as clueless as anyone else about Twitter or Facebook and how those services can benefit journalism.”

Faulty research design will produce faulty results. A small, qualitative focus group packaged as a reality show will really be testing the quality and accuracy of each journalist’s contact list, not the utility of Twitter or Facebook. They are only tools for information sharing, the platforms where people connect. It’s still up to humans to verify sources and publish quality content.

Inuksuit, Mount Washington

Cate Simpson’s interview in This Magazine’s Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Christopher Shaw, founder of No Games 2010 and now lead spokesperson for 2010 Watch, opened my eyes to the dark side of the Olympic machine. It’s sad to read about the curious spending priorities for a two-week event that will leave a large hole in the province’s coffers for decades to come:

This: Who are the biggest losers in the Games?

Shaw: You and me, and our kids and our grandkids. This is going to be the Big Owe: we’re going to be paying for this for 30 years. The Olympic adventure has cost Vancouver a considerable amount of money, and some of it will never come back. The operating budget is a $60-million deficit, and there’s no way the city can keep the 250 units [of the Athlete’s Village] that were going to be social housing. They have to sell them. Basically, the province is paying for Vancouver’s party.

Editor Graham Scott excoriates the dialectic of spending $1.98 billion to widen the Sea-to-Sky Highway for a two-week event rather than implement a national housing strategy for the homeless. Even more bizarre: the President of the IOC requires a “video wall”, a bank of televisions to ensure that he can see any Olympic event at any time, at the same time. Can’t he change channels?

If only we could have world-class athletic competition without the circus.

The best part of the Olympics is watching the games, learning about the stories of the underdogs, the champions, and cheering for their quest for excellence under pressure. That’s the spirit.

As luck would have it, I had my camera with me today while walking in the late fall sunshine and unseasonably warm air.

This immature Cooper’s Hawk swooped in, as if on cue, and perched in the tree above for a long time, oblivious to my footsteps rustling in the leaves below as I jostled for a good sight line.

Cooper's Hawk

The loud whack at the front door woke me up again at 5am, reminding me that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. I was paying a monthly fee of $33.68 for the home-delivered print edition of The Globe and Mail to be hurled against the door, effectively paying to lose an hour of sleep. It was clearly time to change something.

But what to do? I could leave a light on – funny how if someone were up early with a light on, the paper would magically appear by stealth delivery, not by strong-arm pitch from the street. But burning a light bulb all night is a waste of energy.

Come to think of it, it’s even a bigger waste to pay for news content to be printed on trees made into inked paper in a factory and then driven to my front door. The whole production chain from cradle to grave boggles the mind: logging, trucking, milling, printing, home delivery, and even more processing with recycling.

News has been available for a long time in many other formats that do not waste as much energy. I know I’m late to the party breaking this print habit and moving to a digital format. But reading the hard copy paper had become part of my morning routine of rising early before the family chaos and enjoy a good read with a quiet breakfast.

Online print subscription trial

Incredibly, you can’t change your subscription from home delivery to the digital print edition with one move: you have to cancel one by phone and then sign up for the other online. Good grief.

I liked that $15.95 monthly fee would be less than half of the home delivery rate, which had increased 54% from the $21.80 I was paying in 2002. I also liked that I would not be lugging a full blue box to the street every week.  I could have access to all of the different regional versions, archives and premium investor tools.

I hated the online print edition. Here’s why:

1. It’s too small to read and can’t be resized to fit my screen. (And yes, I have a large screen.) I can’t just grab the bottom corner and drag the whole thing bigger, like I can with a zinio digital magazine. The bounding box is irritating, requiring squinting to discern even titles. The zoom function is too labour intensive: even though it makes the text a readable size, as soon as you flip the page, the document returns to the smaller state and has to be zoomed again.  Argh!
2. The sidebar is irritating. While the text becomes a readable size in the sidebar column, it requires a specific grab on the narrow scroll bar to advance the text. I would prefer to scroll down by rolling a trackball anywhere, like I can on any web page. This requirement for spurious accuracy ticks me off.
3. I never got around to exploring any of the regional editions. After persisting with one edition, tiring of the need to zoom and rezoom to read articles of interest, I had invested too much time already.
4. Try as I might with the archives search, I could never find a particular fictional satire piece that ran last fall about Sarah Palin’s descendants that I was hoping to share with a friend.
5. I never used the investor tools – they were nice in theory but I didn’t take them for a spin.

Comparing the online digital version

Side by side, the online digital version was an easier read, albeit with its own drawbacks.  The Globe has correctly determined that the online web site should have an entirely different user interface. There are graphics, icons, titles, menus, a heads-up dashboard menu and thumbnails to click on. Once you select what you want to read, articles are a readable size, not requiring any zooming.

But Flash ads are such a distraction from the content. It’s downright ironic that a content marketer needs revenue from ads that are hell-bent on taking readers’ eyeballs in all directions away from the content.  Most of the Flash ads run in the same location so I can block the screen to avoid them.

Scrolling on the page is easy using a trackball, with the one caveat of needing to avoid rolling over the magnifying glass icons, spry widgets that pop up extra menus with random content someone else has decided is related.

The larger question of content delivery

In terms of news consumption, the question becomes how to still get my fix. Much has been written about the demise of news in print format as the Internet and social media grow exponentially. Content is indeed king, but the question becomes how best to receive that content and at what price. Since joining Twitter last spring, I found I was tapped into lots of news that would be covered on television and radio the same day but found in The Globe and Mail the next day.

Historically, I depended on The Globe and Mail to be my filter for thoughtful, researched journalism and it delivered. Over the last few years however, I have found a shift toward more entertainment fluff and less in-depth pieces as departments have been downsized. For example, all too often a staffer who just happens to be in a foreign location writes the lead Travel article, so it feels like the section has become a wrapper for the travel ads, not an interesting read about travel.

Twitter, RSS feeds and Google Reader have broadened my net for news sources such that I don’t view The Globe and Mail as my main source any longer. It has become one of many places to find news, and moreover, the role of filter has shifted to me.

Bottom line decision

I know someone has to pay journalists to create the stories, conduct the interviews and provide the thoughtful analysis I crave. What would I be willing to pay for? News in a format that delivers timely and insightful content in an accessible format, and doesn’t cost me sleep.

While I admit that I feel like a defector, my decision is to go with the free online version. Flash ads be damned, at least it’s presented in a size I can read. The extra hour of sleep every day is well worth it.

Bruce National Park October 2005

While I would much rather have been on the Bruce Peninsula today, hiking along the shore with the wild wind doing its best to smash sunshine and water into the rocks, a hike at a conservation area provided some welcome glimpses of fall colour.

Scanlon Creek Conservation Area October 2009