This past February, occupiers in the James administration used Twitter to brand themselves as #6party, and to communicate with their supporters. They advertised a livestream feed, from which they broadcast the first hours of their time in Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson’s office. They dispatched press releases on a blog. On the first day of the occupation, after denying them food from supporters, and before shutting off the water in the washrooms, the administration took away their wireless connection.

It is almost a banal point to say that the internet is an essential tool to social organization today – from organizing protests, to house parties, to vote mobs – it’s become irreplaceable. But the radical new powers that have been granted to the average netizen have proven a speed bump to institutions that are based on a more traditional model.: In the context of authoritarian forces seeking to continue their control, or grandiose activists, such as Anonymous wishing to overturn the status quo, the internet – or control thereof – can serve as an irresistible tool to meet their goals.

The role of social media is often cited as a key factor in the success of a variety of ...

The fact that we can choose to consume animal protein of all varieties at every meal is only made possible by an uncomfortably disgusting supply chain. Many consumers rarely give a single thought to the industrial horror that enables this voracious consumption, simply buying the neatly packaged results of this process. As a red-blooded Albertan carnivore, I participate in this process. In the context of a growing world of seven billion hungry people, we should at least be able to stomach the disturbing reality of the meat on our plate. Among those of us who eat meat – roughly 96 per cent of Canadians – it often seems an unspoken reality to not talk about the process behind its production.

Right now, we “produce” over 58 billion animals every year to satisfy our hunger. The issue boils down to one of supply and demand. How can you maximize the amount of meat produced in the shortest amount of time? The answer that the market has come up with is the factory farm. Forget idyllic scenes of frolicking livestock living out happy lives before a humane slaughter, well over 99 per cent of all animals produced for consumption will come from factory farms. To maximize ...

Global climate change is a process that takes much more than a single lifetime to play out – or to see the worst effects. On a long-term scale, the scope of the change is so great that geologists have proposed that we are currently living through the dawn of a new geologic era: the Anthropocene, also known as the Age of Humanity.

It was only a few thousand years ago that much of North America was covered in kilometer-thick layers of ice. The ices ebbed and flowed across the continent over the course of millenia due to natural warming caused by the Earth’s wobbly orbit around the sun. Our current place in the complex ‘wobble’ would ordinarily put us at the beginning of another period of giant ice sheets scraping across the continents. But we’re not only stopping this ice age, we’re going much further: The forecast for the Anthropocene is that it’s to be an age of extreme warming.

In the best case scenario: we collectively dump only a half-trillion ton slug of carbon dioxide equivalent gasses, and the world becomes two degrees Celsius warmer. What does a world that is two degrees warmer actually look like? We need only look ...

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, vying for Canada’s 12th “Fossil of the Day” award – given to the most environmentally retroactive country by the Climate Action Network – became the first Kyoto signatory to formally break its commitments to the protocol in mid-December 2011. First put in place in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was an international agreement to cut down on global carbon emissions in an attempt to mitigate some of the more dire effects expected from anthropogenic climate change.

The Canadian government, which has been a long-time critic of Kyoto, the only legally binding greenhouse gas agreement in existence, cited the fact that both China and the United States were not members of the Kyoto accord, and thus not bound to pay the significant costs that were set to be imposed on Canada. Collectively, those countries alone produce around 40 per cent of the total global emissions, whereas Canada produces less than 2 per cent. However, since the Chrétien government signed the protocol in 1997, per-capita emissions of Canadians have risen over 25 per cent from the specified target of a 6 per cent decrease from 1990 levels.

Under the penalties formerly agreed to in the accord, this increase over the prescribed ...

The basic idea behind scepticism was perhaps best summarized by the physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” This principle is exponentially more difficult to uphold in the modern era, where information of all degrees of truthfulness can flow without limit. To further complicate things, there are whole industries based on pseudoscientific nonsense that are more than willing to take your hard-earned cash from your gullible hands.

So how do we protect ourselves from the unscrupulous people who brazenly lie to enrich themselves? We need a bullshit detector to separate truth from their profitable claims. Luckily for us, the scientific method provides us with exactly the tools for the job! A brief review: any claim must be backed up with clear, inarguable, and reproducible evidence. Furthermore, this evidence ought to be free of the various cognitive biases that humans bring into the picture unintentionally. This includes conflating correlation and causation or interpreting data in a way that favourably confirms your presuppositions. Although this sounds simple in principle, it is nearly impossible to consistently apply.

In fact, in many situations, we actively wish to suspend these principles of scientific ...