This week we heard an excerpt of a lecture delivered by John Ralston Saul in Calgary on April 18th, 2012 at the  Knox United Church.

Ralston Saul has written 5 novels and 11 nonfiction titles including The Unconscious Civilization as well as The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. He is a companion of the order of Canada, the recipient of 14 honorary degrees, as well as a Governor General’s award for nonfiction. In 1995 Raulston Saul delivered that year’s Massey Lecture.

His talk in Calgary was put on by the Arusha Centre: a collectively run, member-supported organisation that provides resources and programming on local and global social justice issues. For more information on the Arusha Centre please visit www.arusha.org.

The first in a series commemorating what would have been the 100th anniversary of his birth.

In 2012 people around the world are celebrating Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. Declared as the “father of computer science” he is also well known for aiding in cracking the enigma code during the second world war and establishing key concepts that shaped computer science. He was an innovator who couldn’t sit still. He showed interests in logic, mathematics, speech encryption and even biology. This series explores the many facets of turing’s life from his early paper completed at Princeton which clearly solved the perplexing decision problem all the way up to his tragic suicide in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England when he was only 41 years old.

Canada’s National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency are currently holding hearings of a Joint Review Panel, assessing Enbridge Inc.’s proposal to build a pipeline that would connect Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitmat, British Columbia. Christopher Peter and Norman Jacob of C.J. Peter Associates Engineering presented testimonies detailing the amount of energy that would be expended in order to get resources from Northern Alberta’s Tar Sands to a refinery in China. CJSW’s Marc Affeld spoke to Christopher and Norman over the phone to try and make sense of the numbers, in this episode of CJSW Presents… 

Christopher and Norman gave their testimonies at a Panel session in Prince George, British Columbia on January 18th, 2012 .You can find all of the transcripts of the hearings on the National Energy Board’s website.

Part 2 of Richard Gwyn’s biography on Macdonald Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times was shortlisted for both the Writer’s Trust of Canada and Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction. Gwyn sat down in the CJSW studios to discuss the biography.