However, I had a specific question to ask. I was there taping anyway, so here’s my coverage!

My question, which was not presented (probably due to its length):

Alberta wastes valuable natural gas in process of adding hydrogen to bitumen, resulting in oil that can be then processed into gasoline etc.
 
Deploying LFTRs (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) would supply us with heat and electricity which would (using copper-chlorine cycle) let us stop wasting our natural gas in this process.
 
China is racing ahead of everyone in LFTR development, and have stated their intention to control the intellectual property.
 
LFTR promises inexpensive electricity, reduce our CO2 output when processing oil sands, and offers vast improvements over every other commercial form of fission, including our widely respected CANDU.
 
LFTR enables local inexpensive energy production. Can we invest in LFTR research instead of soon-to-be-redundant transmission line capacity? Or will we be paying licensing fees to China when we inevitably build these things?

Not having this question answered during the forum, here are the candidates discussing thorium afterwards…

Lee Easton on Thorium

Randy Royer on Thorium

Glenn Taylor on Thorium

Glenn Taylor left before I had a chance to approach him at the forum (he happened to be the last person I could have gotten to). Glenn has since spoken with me via recorded video Skype about Thorium.

Tammy Maloney on Thorium

I briefly spoke to Tammy after the debate, and she suggested we discuss the topic by phone before she go on the record discussing the subject. She’d seen TEDxYYC Kirk Sorensen video “Can Thorium End Our Energy Crisis?” already, but wasn’t ready yet to speak on the topic.

We have since had a decent phone conversation, and Tammy is aware of the many Albertan industries which can benefit from our use of LFTR. She agrees it is important, but does not see where funds for research can be found, asking where does one cut to find the money.

Tammy won’t be able to participate in a recorded Skype call before the leadership election.

Alberta Party – Good for LFTR?

My sense at this point, from the candidates I’ve spoken to, is that they’re open to new technology, and appreciate that this is indeed a different type of nuclear power.

They all deserve credit for having some knowledge of the subject before our conversations: I’d tweeted them in advance I’d like to discus LFTR, so our discussion was less “what is LFTR?” and more about their approach to new technologies.

The most promising aspect of the Alberta Party in this matter: their policy can be influenced by a grassroots movement to promote this clean energy technology. Certainly I don’t have answers for how research can be funded. But if enough Alberta Party members from industries demanding cheap electricity (or enough Alberta Party environmentalists understand what is being offered), it is quite feasible LFTR will soon have political allies at the provincial level.

What is LFTR?

And just in case you were only looking for debate coverage of Alberta Party leadership candidates, and you have no clue what this “LFTR” thing is of which I speak… Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.

It is the most practical & essential technology I’ve ever heard of, since some guy decided mice needed lasers instead of balls.

10 Minute TEDx video – “Can Thorium End Our Energy Crisis?”

16 Minute (more technical) video – “LFTR in 16 Minutes”

If you’ve watched those 2 videos, then the most important piece of information you need to know is this: China is already researching thorium powered molten salt reactors, and they’re seeking to file patents on the technology.

2011-10-21 Update:

THORIUM REMIX 2011 is now complete. This is my recommended video resource for learning about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (a type of Thorium Molten Salt Reactor). It begins with a brief summary comparing LFTR to Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR).

I don’t live in Calgary-Centre-North, but @harpsinyyc and @Oryxzen suggested this was an important event. Based on the audience intensity, it seemed pretty important.

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license. If you remix it, link to my original. If you post a remix to YouTube, be sure to also use an annotation hyperlink.

I don’t want anyone complaining that the applause levels don’t reflect reality. I’m having trouble with my video editing software SONY VEGAS, which crashes when I perform a copy/paste operation, so I’m stuck with a single audio track for this video. The single audio track is board audio, so the candidates certainly sound good. But the sound person wasn’t worried about accurately passing the crowd’s cheering and booing to the speakers, since everyone in the room could hear that quite clearly anyway.

Hey, you ask, SONY… Isn’t that the same company that just lost all their Playstation customer info to a hacker? And sent out CDs infected with Trojans back in 2005? They kill puppies don’t they?

I can’t speak to the puppy question, all I know is their video editing software as-of version 10.0c won’t let me copy/paste reliably. Copy/paste! (Final Cut X is coming out in July for $300. Good to hear.)

Anyway…

15 Minute Highlight Reel

If you don’t have 92 minutes to spend watching the entire debate, there’s a Calgary-Centre-North Forum 15 minute highlight reel you should check out. It may not cover everything, but what it does cover is pretty interesting.

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license. If you remix it, link to my original. If you post a remix to YouTube, be sure to also use an annotation hyperlink.

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license. If you remix it, link to my original. If you post a remix to YouTube, be sure to also use an annotation hyperlink.

Calgary City Council live audio stream. Will be active from 9:30 AM onward on November 29, 2010.

This is an experiment to illustrate how an audio stream can be offered up to smartphone users.

Previous experiment was delivered directly from City Hall. This time the city’s Window Media stream is being relayed remotely (well… from my house) to an IceCast2 server.

Also, instead of videotaping City Council myself, I’ll be focusing on capturing the Windows Media stream, and reviewing a neighbor’s recording off cable to try retrieve Close Captioning data.

This post will be updated/replaced with a post-mortem after a day’s relay and capture. The ultimate goal is to offer not just live audio, but a complete transcript of the day’s session based on Close Caption work already being paid for by the city (but not yet fully leveraged).

UPDATE:

The audio relay worked fine, once I was playing the stream with VLC. Windows Media Player embedded in the city’s website kept timing out (deliberately I assume), so audio kept dropping out every 30 minutes. VLC addressed that, but couldn’t address the city’s Windows Media video feed disappearing. I was told that means their server is crashing.

Neighbor’s DVD Recording of SHAW did not include close captions. And (me never having used a DVD recorder before) the resolution was only 352×240. Guess that is what happens when use the “8 hours on a 4.7GB disc” setting.

My brother was taping on his PVR, but some Googling shows best-case the video content can only be copied off it in 1x playback speed… despite all the data ports at the back of his SHAW PVR, there’s no file copy off of it.

I will post Nov 29th footage here once I’ve collected it all from my neighbor. But the quality will be poor.

I’ve ordered SHAW Digital TV. Too hard to organize decent City Council recordings otherwise. And it is the only practical way to reliably provide an audio stream (until the city starts doing so).

UPDATE 2:

Have created a dedicated page for Calgary City Council streaming audio.

Source material was culled from the 6 mayoral candidate debates I’ve posted to my own account. These debates can all be found by filtering my blog posts down to those categorized “POLITICS”.

I’ve seen a few comments on YouTube stating that I’m trying to make Barb Higgins look bad. While I certainly didn’t go out of my way to try make her look good, consider that there is a reason Higgins didn’t want a three candidate debate. The reason was not that she kicks ass discussing policy.

This 3 candidate debate consists almost entirely of questions that all 3 candidates had a chance to answer. Not every candidate answered every question! While the early debates consisted of very few questions being answered by every candidate, formats eventually shifted to token systems were candidates were given a limited number of opportunities to respond. This made for more intelligent debates, but meant many questions didn’t get responses from all 3 candidates.

I don’t apologize for showing Barb (IMHO) utterly failing to impress when asked how she’d cut red tape at CivicCamp, all 3 candidates fielded “how” questions, so that was guaranteed to be a keeper. But if you take the time to skip through some of the “complete” debates to monitor Higgin’s responses, you’ll probably find more jems like this one (18:32). Compare Higgins’ response to Jon Lord (who’s response follows Higgins).

Like you care what I think

The election is tomorrow, and I’m just about to share my thoughts now (before bed-time). I’ve waited this long because my opinion shouldn’t be important to anyone. Certainly not compared to facts. Facts are what I’ve been sharing when I shoot video. We’re all entitled to our own opinions, but we’re not entitled to our own facts. So if you’ve consumed any one of my debates, I like to think you’re about to cast an informed vote.

So now that the important stuff is out of the way, what do I think?

Barb Higgins might make an OK mayor. There are certainly other candidates who performed worse than her in the debates …out of a field of 15. But if we had instant run-off voting, my preference for mayor would have to be:

1. Naheed Nenshi
2. Wayne Stewart (who has stepped down and endorsed Naheed Nenshi)
3. Ric McIver
4. Jon Lord
5. Barb Higgins

I knew of Naheed Nenshi long before the election from his TEDxCalgary talk which I enjoyed (as one of my favorites from the event) and videotaped for the TEDx team. Because of this, early in his campaign he asked me to help create a platform video, which I was happy to help with. But I felt it was too early to decide who I’d be supporting (or if I would even get involved at all beyond voting).

Naheed Nenshi became my #1 choice shortly after the “We Should Know Naheed Nenshi” event on September 15, during which he fielded questions from a room full of not-yet-convinced voters. His answers conveyed a deep understanding of a bewildering array of civic (and bureaucratic) challenges, and he let me videotape every Q & A exchanged. He did this after I made it explicit to him, I was still undecided and was doing so for my own video blogging purposes, not for his campaign.

What did not happen after that day, was that other candidates did not emerge with detailed policy proposals. It seemed no one else was even trying to convince me they understood how to reform Calgary’s bureaucracy. That they understood precisely why Calgary Transit is essential, and any sub-par performance on its part puts Calgary at a competitive disadvantage. That while our budget must be balanced, the bang-per-buck spent is more important than now many bucks.

Waste is the enemy. Wasted tax dollars. Wasted man-hours. The wasted intellectual capacity of city employees who don’t have an opportunity to improve their own processes.

So I volunteered to help the campaign, not just a good-luck-with-that platform video, but actually get involved. I have to say, if Nenshi can run Calgary as well as his campaign team have run their campaign, our city has some exciting times ahead.

The Nenshi campaign is described in the press as one that “employs social media” to market itself effectively. That is wrong. The campaign uses the internet to get stuff done in the manner any start-up would. That which can be delegated is delegated. That which can be crowdsourced is crowdsourced. Communication channels are always open. Initiatives are taken. Results shared. Lessons learned.

I never saw anyone lose their cool.

I never saw an opportunity that was missed because of a communications bottleneck or someone unwilling to make a decision.

I never saw a campaign dollar spent foolishly.

I didn’t agree with every decision that was made, but I never felt my input was being ignored, or that the decision making process was a poor one. And ultimately I don’t see any opportunities we missed (except for obvious financial constraints). I was (and am) surprised to see perpetual innovation and volunteer initiative. The team was all about getting stuff done.

In short, this was how an organization should be run.

Monday, October 18 is election day. It is going to be a great day.

Comparing candidates performance at VoteCalgary forum, then contrasting against their performance against CivicCamp forum (where “sustainable” is all the rage) could have reflected poorly on any candidate to played too strongly to their respective audience. But candidates pretty much held their ground no matter who they were speaking to. (Darn! No explosive juxtapositions between debates!)

This forum (which allowed rebuttals and rebuttal-rebuttals) was refreshingly short… aside from an introductory question, and a closing question, the only non-bookend question was “How will you support inward, upward and outward city growth?”

Host	Craig	Joe	Bob	Barb	Jon	Ric	Naheed	Wayne
introduction	00:40	02:28	04:04	05:20	06:54	08:28	10:04	11:37
city growth					15:58		14:53	13:48
						17:28	16:30
	21:31			20:27	19:24	18:52	18:30
		23:38	22:44	21:46				24:45
	26:17	25:20
	28:00					27:21
differentiate	29:02	29:56	31:00	32:04	33:12	34:15	35:18	36:21

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license.

“What’s going on here? Can you believe it!?” -Oscar Fech

Did you know many candidates are polling at zero? As an infamous FOX NEWS host would say, “Now is no time to give up!”

The CivicCamp forum followed ArtsVote’s limited responses token system (this time it was poker chips), which kept things at a brisk pace, as did the entertaining lightning round.

Host	Craig	Gary	Joe	Jon	Bob	Ric	Oscar	Naheed	Barb	Wayne
introduction	10:02	03:39	01:26	17:20	19:30	21:42	07:48	04:39	14:10	12:06
	23:56		06:49
bike paths	25:15								28:30	26:50
heritage sites	35:00			34:10			33:15	31:28	29:50
new subdivisions		37:49		40:16	38:50	36:18	41:14	39:22
homeless		46:46		45:05			43:28			47:40
urban sprawl	54:30		51:02	53:35	49:23				52:41
Race City	56:01						57:13	56:43	56:19	56:12
urban farming		59:36	59:16	58:01	58:45	58:23
expand recycling		1:02:32			1:03:20	1:04:10		1:05:06	1:01:07	1:00:07
ring road	1:10:05				1:10:25		1:08:08	1:06:18
secondary suites	1:17:10		1:14:30	1:11:38	1:16:17	1:13:13			1:15:18
Plan It		1:20:03			1:21:26
transportation	1:24:36		1:23:11				1:26:18
policy how	1:33:30	1:36:10	1:32:42	1:34:20	1:31:10	1:29:23	1:35:10	1:30:13	1:28:26	1:31:52
campaign finance					1:37:05	1:40:24		1:38:40
smart growth			1:41:23			1:45:50	1:42:14	1:44:53		1:43:56
growth boundary		1:46:53							1:47:50	1:49:18
library funding			1:54:00		1:53:02	1:50:22				1:51:47
downtown LRT	1:56:36	2:00:06		1:55:00		2:02:04		2:01:00	1:58:07	1:59:09
biggest issue	2:09:05	2:12:43	2:14:22	2:05:31	2:04:24	2:03:16	2:10:12	2:11:26	2:06:42	2:07:54

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license.

And I’d like to apologize to any color blind folk looking at my table. I’ve run out of ideas how to visually compress this information.

“The organizers had to make arrangements to get the candidates quite early. There are a few candidates running for mayor who are not onstage, but are here this afternoon. Afterwards, stick around and you can put your questions to them.” – Jim Brown

It would appear ArtsVote, by soliciting participation early and having a deadline, has solved this problem. Good on them, because the result was a better forum.

And, seriously, they put thought into how to force candidates to use their time wisely, and only speak when they have a critical point to make.

I enjoyed this Calgary mayoral forum immensely, and I hope you do too. Thanks to Chelsea Pratchett for help covering the event, and to ArtsVote for allowing me to do this in an official capacity.

Host	Wayne	Ric	Naheed	Jon	Joe	Craig	Bob	Barb
introduction	01:33	03:29	05:04	06:44	08:25	10:00	11:37	13:17
forced closures				19:22		21:02		17:18
affordable space			24:29		22:26
accessibility		29:00				30:56	32:29
CATA budget	34:10				35:49			36:55
arts festivals			43:10	39:08			41:27
funding solution	50:14		46:39					48:35
retain artists	54:20	55:48				52:32
funding pitch		60:15		61:57			58:13
buh bye	67:00	66:38	66:13	65:24	Gone!	64:43	64:15	63:35

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license.

“We Should Know Naheed Nenshi” was an event Mark organized (Sept 15th) to help undecided voters to hang out, talk, and hear Nenshi’s elevator pitch.

The event was open to everyone, had delicious food, sparked some fascinating conversations… the only thing missing was photons. You know, photons, like from the sun, from fire… from light bulbs. So the footage is kinda grainy.

I hope this coverage of Nenshi’s Q & A session illustrates why I think he’s such an exciting candidate for mayor. Nenshi’s policy proposals are very detailed, and it is clear he has a deep understanding of how to implement bureaucratic reform, and fix Calgary’s budgeting process.

This video is released under Creative Commons share-alike 3.0 license.

UPDATE: It appears Bob Hawkesworth has cited this video as Nenshi “being on the record” saying he’d sell ENMAX.

I believe anyone but Bob Hawkesworth watching this video would come to a very different conclusion.

I was already under the impression Hawkesworth was the only candidate factually wrong on the issue of the airport tunnel. Is this a Calgarian example of a political candidate inhabiting their own reality, as seen far too often in the USA?

Just the fact Hawkesworth isn’t willing to share where he saw Nenshi “on the record” talking about ENMAX, makes me think Hawkesworth knows he’s not on solid ground with his claim.

What pisses me off here, Bob, is that not only are you quoting Nenshi in my video out of context. You are behaving in a way that makes our mayoral candidates less likely to speak frankly about these issues. If every candidate knows their words will be taken out of context by their opponents, then they’ll revert to vague platitudes and intelligent discussion will cease.

Bob, I don’t see any video of you online sharing your insights on the topic of ENMAX. You know how hard it is to use an iPhone to video yourself talking in depth about any topic, and uploading that to YouTube? It is not hard at all.

UPDATE 2: Bob Hawkesworth first shoddily re-edited the We-Should-Know-Nenshi video (posting only his misleading edit), then finally (after a DMCA takedown citing the rules of the Creative Commons license) Bob linked to the original video.

Bob Hawkesworth is still being misleading on this, and I have no idea what his intention is at this point, except having the Nenshi campaign join his own in the “out of the mayoral race” category.

I’ve downloaded copies of the videos Bob’s posted, and I’ll have more to say on this once I’m done working on more important election video coverage (like indexing the content of mayoral forums).