This Magazine articles from May 1996

This Magazine archives from May 1996

Swiping cash.
May 1, 1996... Canada's chartered banks have certainly received their fair share of attention in the past few months. And why not? For those of you who have just returned from space, they raked in record profits in fiscal 1995. The so-called "Big Six"...

Embarrass.Harris.on-line.
May 1, 1996... "When I design a Web site, it's gotta have content," says K.K. Campbell. "It's nice to have some fun and some flash and some pictures and some humour, but it should also have a reason to be. And the reason to be is to deliver information into...

Paging Mr. (Fidel) Castro: in Cuba, political dissidents grapple to get their hands on communications technologies.
May 1, 1996... Last December, I was in Cuba researching a business story on a Canadian trying to set up a consulting practice in Havana. Like many business people in Cuba these days, he was a bit skittish around the media. Initially, he asked me to come to...

Funny money: will the advent of digital cash trigger a new underground economy?
May 1, 1996... One Sunday evening about six months ago, my partner and I came home to find our kitchen ceiling on the floor. You see, we live on the main floor of a two-storey house, and the neighbours upstairs aren't very good about cleaning the gunk out of...

Spy vs. spy: selling anti-union intelligence has become a new corner of the information economy (LaborBase).
May 1, 1996... "People... Human Resources...," begins a page on the World Wide Web. "Are they working for or against you?" In this corner of cyberspace, that isn't just a rhetorical question - you might have caught the edge of genuine paranoia here. Or...

Dialing for dollars: new charges for local phone calls would set activism, seniors and the poor back about fifty years.
May 1, 1996... Vancouverite Russ Hunter remembers when his family got its first telephone, back in 1926. He had a job driving a logging truck. His family was worried, so he called regularly from the road to tell them he was alright. "The phone was our...

Sex and the single geek: interactive porn CD-ROMs provide an, ahem, intimate glimpse into how the male techie world sees women.
May 1, 1996... In the kitchen, a dewy blonde named Molly bats her eyelashes at me and invitingly thrusts a pair of silicon-enhanced breasts against the flimsy material of her t-shirt. Things are looking good - I'm thinking that I definitely made the right...

Keeping score: snapshots of how technology is changing the job market.
May 1, 1996... The question of how technology is affecting jobs is probably one of the thorniest facing workers, employers, and governments today. Forced-grin info-tech management consultants assure us that computerization is creating more jobs, better jobs....

Midland operators: when it comes to "re-engineering" a workplace, labour could take its lead from a gang of Ontario telephone workers.
May 1, 1996... The official discourse on technological restructuring won't help us come to terms with what is happening, or help us to deal with it as the urgent social issue it is. It won't help us because it's centered not on the needs and priorities of...

Naked lunch: Canada's dismal biotechnology regulations are as full of holes as Swiss cheese.
May 1, 1996... Ever since the advent of Tang and the ersatz edibles of the chemical age, it has been dangerously appetite-diminishing to read food labels. While eating some Korean crackers recently, I chanced on the following translation describing the...

Ursula major (Ursula Franklin).
May 1, 1996... When Ursula Franklin delivered the CBC Massey Lectures in 1989, she was easily five years ahead of her time. The lectures were called "The Real World of Technology", and her thesis was simple: new technologies not only create new ways of doing...

Back to the Futurism: hey, cybercritics -- reports of the novel's death are greatly exaggerated.
May 1, 1996... I'm sitting in the kitchen with my girlfriend/significant-other, Gil, several days back, comparing book purchases. Hers is a scary-looking computer tome, Using Windows `95: The Most Complete Reference. It's about 2,000 pages long with an...

Blue boulevard.
May 1, 1996... There is a deep blue boulevard where no stars hang and the atmosphere drips too cold to call rain where sidewalks barely remember where they've been shifting slow and cracked as if attempting cobblestone ...